On Chaos I

“Every deep thinker and observer of the Natural Laws is convinced that Nature is an orderly arrangement of matter and forces; that, in a word, Nature is not chaos, but cosmos.” (Frederick Hovenden, “What is Life?”, 1899) 

"[…] there is a God precisely because Nature itself, even in chaos, cannot proceed except in an orderly and regular manner." (Immanuel Kant) “There is no such thing as chaos, it tacitly asserts, in the sidereal world or outside of it. For chaos is the negation of law, and law is the expression of the will of God.” (Agnes M Clerke, “Problems in Astrophysics”,  1903)

“Beauty had been born, not, as we so often conceive it nowadays, as an ideal of humanity, but as measure, as the reduction of the chaos of appearances to the precision of linear symbols. Symmetry, balance, harmonic division, mated and mensurated intervals - such were its abstract characteristics.” (Herbert E Read, “Icon and Idea”, 1955)

“Chaos is but unperceived order; it is a word indicating the limitations of the human mind and the paucity of observational facts. The words ‘chaos’, ‘accidental’, ‘chance’, ‘unpredictable’ are conveniences behind which we hide our ignorance.” (Harlow Shapley, “Of Stars and Men”, 1958) 

“One of mankind’s earliest intellectual endeavors was the attempt to gather together the seemingly overwhelming variety presented by nature into an orderly pattern. The desire to classify - to impose order on chaos and then to form patterns out of this order on which to base ideas and conclusions - remains one of our strongest urges.” (Roger L Batten, 1959) 

“The central task of a natural science is to make the wonderful commonplace: to show that complexity, correctly viewed, is only a mask for simplicity; to find pattern hidden in apparent chaos.” (Herbert A Simon, “The Sciences of the Artificial”, 1969)

”Where chaos begins, classical science stops. For as long as the world has had physicists inquiring into the laws of nature, it has suffered a special ignorance about disorder in the atmosphere, in the fluctuations of the wildlife populations, in the oscillations of the heart and the brain. The irregular side of nature, the discontinuous and erratic side these have been puzzles to science, or worse, monstrosities.” (James Gleick, “Chaos”, 1987)

“The flapping of a single butterfly’s wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done.” (Ian Stewart, “Does God Play Dice?”, 1989)

“We have found chaos, but what it means and what its relevance is to our place in the universe remains shrouded in a seemingly impenetrable cloak of mathematical uncertainty.” (Ivars Peterson, “Newton’s Clock”, 1993)

“The voyage of discovery into our own solar system has taken us from clockwork precision into chaos and complexity. This still unfinished journey has not been easy, characterized as it is by twists, turns, and surprises that mirror the intricacies of the human mind at work on a profound puzzle. Much remains a mystery. We have found chaos, but what it means and what its relevance is to our place in the universe remains shrouded in a seemingly impenetrable cloak of mathematical uncertainty.” (Ivars Peterson, “Newton’s Clock”, 1993)