TACVTMD@VM.TCS.TULANE.EDU (Tracy Duvall) (01/19/90)
(My apologies if this arrives twice. I sent the wrong command earlier.) About 1.5 years ago I read a best-selling coffee-table book called *Chaos*, by James Gleick. This book traces how "real" scientists have found order amid chaos amid order. Some of their new techniques and findings should interest those studying history and the other social sciences. Lest snarling condescension begin prematurely, let me first acknowledge that no one has shown that the theories discussed in *Chaos* apply widely on the psychological or social level. However, they do present useful paradigms to test and, if one's faith become's sufficiently strong, to apply. They are especially valuable as methods of graphing, or visualizing, complex phenomena. (The first time I saw a graph of the Mandelbrot set, I said that *that* was how I would draw "History".) -----The Butterfly Effect----- "Sensitive dependence on initial conditions", otherwise known as the "Butterfly Effect" was conceived by a meteorologist who holds that even small, local fluctuations (such as the beating of a butterfly's wings) can have a powerful long-term effect. This is probably a mere restatement of one position in the old debate over whether history is predictable. Physical sciences are, metaphorically, arguing that history is not. This turn of events is a further blow, after quantum mechanics, to those who would argue that predictive ability inevitably increases with scientific knowledge. Since those who hold this view have more often than not been materialists, they might still answer that the overwhelming force of economics makes history different from other dynamic systems. Moreover, in science and in history, the most significant limitation on prediction is data: how much can we process, once we have perfected our models? -----Complex Boundaries----- The graphs of certain functions -- those with complex boundaries -- reveal that item A, close to item B, might possess qualities more similar to a distant item, C. This suggests, again metaphorically, that institutions closely related on the ideological (or some other) spectrum might exhibit surprisingly different behavior or engender divergent effects. In a simplistic example, a government moving toward a policy of no unemployment might, on the way, actually increase unemployment. Policies that seem linked to inflationary or pre-genocidal ones actually might be anti-inflationary or conservative. Gorbachev, in order to increase democratic outlets in the Soviet Union, might wield his dictatorial personal powers increasingly. *If* this sort of thing happens with regularity, in which situations do these complex boundaries arise? I hope that these two examples arouse some interest among historians in reading this book, or at least in looking at the pictures. During my years as a graduate student at the University of Florida, I found that the historians most likely to agree with the suggestions in *Chaos* (and there are more suggestions) were those least likely to trust or enjoy anything mathematical. Tracy Duvall Tulane University (Computing Services) TACVTMD@TCSVM