SOURCE: “Patterns of Order in Disorder,” in Spectator, May 6, 1989, pp. 32–33.

In the following review, Osman discusses the development of chaos theory and offers praise for Gleick's treatment of the subject in Chaos.

We could well be in at the beginning of a new science, as important as those of Newton and Darwin. Like the science of those revolutionaries, the new science of chaos, marvellously described in James Gleick's book, [Chaos,] affects the way we see the world. Newton gave us the universe as a celestial machine: Darwin described a world in which the forms of life evolved by chance and survived by competition. The theorists of chaos guide us through the real world around us, show why conventional science fails so badly to predict ‘real’ events, and show how their new science makes the complexities of reality comprehensible.

Chaos theory shows why, for example, we cannot hope for...