James Gleick - Chaos: Making a New Science (1987)

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In the thousands of articles that made up the technical literature of chaos, few were cited more often than "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow." For years, no single object would inspire more illustrations, even motion pictures, than the mysterious curve depicted at the end, the double spiral that became known as the Lorenz attractor.

James Gleick
Chaotic theory is mathematically based on non-linear propositions, "meaning that they expressed relationships that were not strictly proportional. Linear relationships can be captured with a straight line on a graph"

James Gleick
Linear relationships can be captured with a straight line on a graph. Linear relationships are easy to think about.... Linear equations are solvable... Linear systems have an important modular virtue: you can take them apart, and put them together again — the pieces add up.

James Gleick
Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.

James Gleick
Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition above everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of competition by withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are nomads by choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the subtle disciplines

James Gleick
In the mind's eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.

James Gleick
To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.

James Gleick
The basic idea of Western science is that you don't have to take into account the falling of a leaf on some planet in another galaxy when you're trying to account for the motion of a billiard ball on a pool table on earth. Very small influences can be neglected. There's a convergence in the way things work, and arbitrarily small influences don't blow up to have arbitrarily large effects.

James Gleick