SOURCE: “Nowhere Twice,” in Times Literary Supplement, July 22–28, 1988, p. 800.

In the following review, Pippard discusses chaos theory and offers a favorable assessment of Gleick's treatment of the subject in Chaos.

Haydn's Creation opens with a Representation of Chaos which, while adhering to the rules of musical grammar, confounds at every turn the listener's expectations. Chaos is for Haydn no illogical riot but a paradoxical coexistence of logic and unpredictability, and it is in this sense that the word was imported into science in 1975 to describe what has since been recognized as a pervasive mode of behaviour. The technical literature is voluminous—there is already a new journal dedicated to its study—and very heavy reading it makes, even when not presented in the impenetrable shorthand of pure mathematics.

To appreciate what is involved, consider a tennis-player repeatedly bouncing a ball into the air off his racket. Of course...