Vol. 2, Number 1	Spring 1999 issue

 

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As you slog through the mud slurpee of New Haven in the rain, hopping or wading through pools of filth, you suddenly realize that all the water runs to the low points in the road. Thus the puddles. The profundity. The secret of life has been revealed, and you now know exactly what it is you should be doing.

With logic no more profound than this, a physicist and a philosopher, John Briggs and F. David Peat, attempt, in Seven Life Lessons of Chaos: Timeless Wisdom from the Science of Change, to explain the secrets of life through the careful application of chaos theory. The lessons they emerge with are New Age and facile, rejecting time, hierarchy, and other Western limits on creativity.

Briggs and Peat open their book by broadly delineating the problems addressed by chaos theory, alluding to vague themes of creativity and hidden orders in random things. They never transcend this superficiality. Next, the book plunges in to life lessons, such as local action, creativity, and cooperation, with only haphazard references to physics. The authors point out that mathematical functions are over-simplifications of real systems; our perspectives on the world often involve oversimplification. The brilliant clarity of such an insight clearly depends on the powerful mystery of chaos theory for its authority.

The authors seem to recognize that their science is only marginally convincing and rely on a far more interesting pool of sociological, psychological, and historical examples. The roofing customs of Native American reservations, medieval reliance on church bells over clocks, and the Manhattan food supply system are each described in detail. This body of evidence is actually fairly impressive and interesting. That it is not the acknowledged core of the book is a mere marketing gimmick, and an attempt to cash in on the mystique of modern physics.