David Peat

132 From Certainty to Uncertaintyfractal generators. Suddenly chaos, complexity, and self-organizationsurround us to the point where the general public is using terms moregenerally associated with mathematicians and theoretical physicists,whereas just half a century ago, no one had ever heard of such terms.Only a few decades ago the fluctuations of the stock market wereseen as purely random. Organizations and business were studied interms of rules and hierarchies and good and bad managers. And“chaos” itself? It was simply a word used to mean a pattern withoutany order, an aberration, something not worth studying or taking seriously.Chaos was the garbage can into which everything was thrownthat could not be represented by means of simple rules and behaviors.And what we now know as fractal orders were once called by mathematicians“a gallery of monsters.”How did such a striking change in attitude come about? Why didpeople begin to take an interest in chaos and notice strange, new, complexpatterns of order in what they had previously taken as randomevents? Again, the short answer is that we mainly see what we alreadyknow. Or to put it another way, we could only begin to “see” the innerworld of chaos once we had discovered ways of representing it. Oncewe are given a mental map of the world of chaos we can begin to discernits features.The development of high-speed computers and new mathematicalapproaches made it possible to describe the general nature of chaoticsystems, apparently random fluctuations, and highly complex patterns.These features of nature had always been present, but until themeans to represent them had been discovered they were essentially invisibleto us. These very important aspects of the world had been ignoredbecause we had no real way of looking at them. In 1900 we saw aworld of law, order, and certainty in which chance and randomnesswere unwanted exceptions. Today uncertainty and chaos are seen asessential to the hidden order of the cosmos.ChanceFor the past few hundred years Western science, and the Western mind,have been preoccupied with notions of certainty, predictive power,