David Peat

124 From Certainty to Uncertaintyrising water therefore fights for space against cooler descending water.Inevitably the result is chaos—a complex series of competing flowswithin the pan to the point where it seems impossible to predict howthe water will behave from region to region. Similar forms of turbulenceoccur in a host of different systems: when winds encounter cityskyscrapers, as speedboats rush across lakes, or when commuters enteringa subway station must fight an exiting crowd.Machines that vibrate out of control, static produced in electronicdevices, rivers in flood, atmospheric storms, fluctuations in the stockmarket, and fibrillation of the heart are all examples of systems thatappear unpredictable and out of control, systems in which what happensfrom moment to moment appears to be a matter of pure chancerather than of scientific law.Until KAM and high-speed computers came along such chaoticsystems were regarded as too messy to be within the province of science.Theoretical physicists and engineers preferred not to think aboutthem. If you push a steam engine or an automobile too fast it begins toshudder and quake to the point where it may self-destruct. Such behavioris to be avoided rather than made the subject of research. And ifyou adjust the settings on an amplifier and the room is filled with staticthen clearly you have a badly designed amplifier.Today all such systems are open for study using the approachknown as chaos theory. And if scientists have given up hope of everfully describing a chaotic system, at least they have come a long waytoward understanding them.Chaotic SystemsScientists no longer throw up their hands in horror at chaotic systemsfor they know that such systems conceal many interesting secrets.Chaos itself is one form of a wide range of behavior that extends fromsimple regular order to systems of incredible complexity. And just as asmoothly operating machine can become chaotic when pushed toohard (chaos out of order), it also turns out that chaotic systems cangive birth to regular, ordered behavior (order out of chaos). Chaos