Reader’s Corner

Though this book is not hot off the press, it is new to me—and I have found James Gleick’s Chaos utterly fascinating (just ask the poor person I live with).  Because at the center of so-called chaos theory is the realization of these two opposing ideas: chaos lurks in even the most simple of systems in nature or created by man (say, the pendulum); and yet in even the most wildly chaotic systems, there arise islands of structure, often beautifully complex, as aperiodic or nonlinear as that structure may be.  In his surprisingly accessible book, Gleick illustrates “how nonlinear nature is in its soul.”  From snowflakes to heartbeats to phone lines to animal populations to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot—it all holds a stunningly wild and wildly patterned complexity.

And these ideas don’t all come with solvable equations and neat solutions.  Which is why the concept of chaos as an essential building block of nature was rejected or waved aside by many of those who considered themselves serious hard scientists (though at the same time, I suspect it would not have come as such a great surprise to many philosophers, theologians, or poets).  Humans—and not just scientists—have a way of seeking order, trying to order what appears to be chaotic.  There are so many ways in which we try to make sense out of the overwhelming white noise of life.  Yet, as Gleick points out, “a complex system can give rise to turbulence and coherence at the same time”—and that turbulence is not necessarily destructive.

What if instead of fearing what we perceive as disorder and chaos, we look more deeply into it to find where the richer, more complex patterns lie?  I believe it is in these moments of vision where we get glimpses of truth.  Not a black-and-white, absolute sort of truth, but a truth that is intricately layered, even paradoxical.  How marvelous the idea of chaos sounds when expressed this way:

Those studying chaotic dynamics discovered that the disorderly behavior of simple systems acted as a creative process.  It generated complexity: richly organized patterns, sometimes stable and sometimes unstable, sometimes finite and sometimes infinite, but always with the fascination of living things.

Chaos is actually the underlying structure and creative force of the universe.  To my ear, that is a very beautiful, very holy paradox.

Chaos
by James Gleick
Viking, 1987

—Hannah Fries
Assistant editor, Orion