A powerful leap from chaos

摘要

A few years ago, historians belatedly caught up with the fact that science had moved on somewhat since Newton and Laplace. Years had been spent down culs-de-sac named Hegel, Marx, Toynbee and Braudel, in the vain pursuit of 'laws of history' comparable with the laws of motion. Whereas some historians had reversed out of these dead ends onto the ring road of literary criticism, abandoning the notion that history might have anything to learn from the natural sciences, a few ventured down the winding lane of chaos theory. The key insights of chaos — sensitivity to initial conditions, stochastic behaviour in deterministic systems — had an obvious relevance to historical study, not least because one of the best-known chaotic systems, the world's weather, dominated the lives of most people throughout the long pre-industrial era.