The visits of the Voyager spacecraft to Jupiter. However, much of the work on chaotic systems occurs in Physics departments. Note the word is 'Science,' not 'Physics.' The sub-title is quite reasonable. Enrico Fermi once exclaimed, 'It does not say in the Bible that all laws of nature are expressible linearly!' The mathematicians Stanislaw Ulam remarked that to call the study of chaos 'nonlinear science' was like calling zoology 'the study of nonelephant animals. Gleicks book is his artful use of examples such as this to demonstrate the ubiquity of chaos. James Gleick subtitled his popular book Chaos with Making a New Science. Only a few, that is, understood how nonlinear nature is in its soul. Only a few were able to remember that the solvable, orderly, linear systems were the aberrations. It would be like giving an extra shuffle to an already well. But if you did, then you would never know what it would otherwise have done. You could make it do something different from what it would otherwise have done. When people stumbled across such things-and people did-all their training argued for dismissing them as aberrations. Chaos emerges as a new approach to science in the latter half of the 20th century. Nonlinear systems with real chaos were rarely taught and rarely learned. They did not display sensitive dependence on initial conditions. Textbooks showed students only the rare non-linear systems that would give way to such techniques. Confronted with a nonlinear system, scientists would have to substitute linear approximations or find some other uncertain backdoor approach.

“The solvable systems are the ones shown in textbooks.

Chaos gleick