🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Jul20.153122.29180@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>,
crb7q@kelvin.seas.Virginia.EDU (Cameron Randale Bass) writes:
|>In article <1076@kepler1.rentec.com> andrew@rentec.com (Andrew Mullhapt)
writes

|>    However, my point was that many of the ideas that 'chaos theorists'
|>    have taken credit for are much older.  {...}
|>>>     Now for the editorial, to wit, it is just these kinds of willy-nilly
|>>>     claims that oversold 'chaos' in the first place.
|>>

|>>Read the literature. Then get back to me. Note that in the mathematical
|>>literature, chaos goes back as far as Poincare's Methodes Nouvelles (1899)
|>>and even further. {...}

|>     This is good, if you take credit for 'chaos theory' for all of the
|>     work going back to Poincare, then you are left with a dilemma.  Either
|>     the subject is a rather evolutionary outgrowth of dynamical systems
|>     theory with the addition of large computers to guide us, in which
|>     case it seems difficult to justify assigning earthshattering importance
|>     to it, or it is not, in which case it seems difficult to justify
|>     taking credit for 90 year old results.
                                                                        
I think this point is fallacious. It is like saying that the discovery of the
double helix structure of DNA is an "evolutionary outgrowth" of x-ray
crystallography and has no "earthsattering importance". Even Newton admitted
that if he had voiced some deep and fundamental ideas that he owed a
debt of gratitude to the giants on whose shoulders he stood. The recent
flurry of interest in chaos is indeed based upon a long history of previous
results of great importance, but it is untrue to somehow imply that very
little of the current work is fundamentally new -- it is.

Finally, even if much of what gets said is repitition, it is also useful.
I am always amazed at how much Poincare' really understood. At the same time,
I am amazed how these perceptions were completely missed by the majority
of the physics profession(I agree Dale, some didn't miss it, but most did).
That being the case, I would argue that it is very worthwhile to beat the
drum if for no other reason than to rouse other researchers into listening
for the first time to a branch of mathematics that seems to have widespread
application in physical systems. This process we have seen many times in
physics. The examples that come to my mind are Lie Algebras and Riemannian
Geometry. That this is an needed task is borne out by many of the comments
on this newsgroup that reveal both a fundamental misperception about what
chaos means and a refusal to acknowledge that it fundamentally changes
notions about dynamics in physical systems where it exists (for example,
sensitive dependance on initial conditions implies abscence of predictability).

john w. cobb
jwc@fusion.ph.utexas.edu