What is Chaos: Making a New Science about?

Chaos: Making a New Science, published in 1987, tells the story of how a loose network of scientists working across meteorology, mathematics, biology, and physics in the 1960s and 1970s developed chaos theory — the study of systems that are deterministic but unpredictable because tiny differences in initial conditions produce wildly different outcomes. Gleick, a science journalist, interviewed most of the principal researchers and reconstructed both the science and the personal dynamics of a field that mainstream physics initially dismissed.

The book opens with Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist at MIT who in 1961 discovered that rounding a number in a weather simulation from 0.506127 to 0.506 — a difference of less than 0.1 percent — produced a completely different weather pattern after a few months. This sensitivity to initial conditions is the defining feature of chaotic systems. Lorenz's further work revealed the "strange attractor" — a fractal geometric object that traces the long-term behavior of chaotic systems — and the so-called butterfly effect, the metaphor that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could set off a tornado in Texas.

Gleick follows the development of chaos theory through multiple researchers: Mitchell Feigenbaum, who discovered universal constants governing the transition from orderly to chaotic behavior; Benoit Mandelbrot, who developed fractal geometry to describe the rough, self-similar shapes that chaos produces; Robert May, who found chaotic behavior in simple population models; and many others working on everything from dripping faucets to the turbulence of fluids. The connecting thread is that nature's complexity — the roughness of coastlines, the irregularity of heartbeats, the cascading dynamics of populations — had been idealized away by classical science and was now being taken seriously for the first time.

The book is both a scientific narrative and a sociology of knowledge. Gleick shows how chaos theory struggled for legitimacy, how its practitioners were often outsiders or mavericks, and how the field eventually gained institutional recognition. The writing is vivid and the science is explained without equations, making it accessible to readers with no mathematics background.