SOURCE: A review of Chaos, in Southern Humanities Review, Vol. XXIV, No. 1, Winter, 1990, pp. 75–77.

In the following review, Carrithers offers a positive assessment of Chaos.

In the Prologue to this fascinating account, [Chaos,] Gleick attributes to Joseph Ford this characteristic claim of the “chaos movement”: “Relativity eliminated the Newtonian illusion of absolute space and time; quantum theory eliminated the Newtonian dream of a controllable measurement process; and chaos eliminates the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability.” James Gleick adds that “of the three, the revolution in chaos applies to the universe we see and touch, to objects at human scale.” Gleick, since 1978 an editor and reporter at the New York Times, chronicles the story.

The first chapter features three papers by Edward N. Lorenz published in 1963–64. It was he who showed mathematically and graphically that long-range weather prediction is inherently impossible (rather than merely difficult), and who later gave...