Chaos

Reading James Gleick's bestseller had been long overdue. Nonetheless I'm happy that I've finally gotten down to reading it. It is certainly one of the best pop-sci books ever and without second thought I shall ascribe it to the same pedigree as The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins or Six not so easy pieces by Richard Feynman or What Evolution is by Ernst Mayr. I lay down a few thoughts that came across my mind as I read the book. I also add the disclaimer that some of these would be unapologetically nerdy.

1. Non-linear dynamics is beautiful. I don't understand why the chemical engineering curriculum at IITB avoids it. Even in the most utilitarian sense, I think an advanced course in non-linear dynamics can be a reasonable inclusion. I've heard that much work has been done in investigating the nonlinear dynamics of reactors by Amundson and Aris so it's not really a field alien to chemical engineering.

2. The poster child of non-linear dynamics or chaos theory is the so called Lorenz attractor. A simple system of 3 deterministic ordinary non-linear differential equations yields a solution with time that neither shows periodicity nor converges to a limit. Interestingly it was published in a journal of meteorology and was hardly noticed for nearly ten years. Now that Chaos theory has developed thanks to people like Feigenbaum, Mandelbrot and Smale any standard exposition on chaos begins by describing the Lorenz attractor. But it's nonetheless interesting to see that the genesis of ideas that led to such a rich theory involving physics and mathematics could come from a non-specialist in either. So much for the chauvinists!

3. "Turbulence", Gleick says, "is a problem with pedigree". Apparently Heisenberg is known to have quoted that when the time comes he "would have two questions for God, why relativity and why turbulence?" He added, "I think He will have an answer to the first question."