hatter,” Malcolm said cheerfully. “But you must admit, these are nontrivial issues. We live in a world of frightful givens. It is
given
that you will behave like this,
given
that you will care about that. No one thinks about the givens. Isn’t it amazing? In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought.”
Hammond turned to Gennaro and raised his hands. “You invited him.”
“And a lucky thing, too,” Malcolm said. “Because it sounds as if you have a serious problem.”
“We have no problem,” Hammond said quickly.
“I always maintained this island would be unworkable,” Malcolm said. “I predicted it from the beginning.” He reached into a soft leather briefcase. “And I trust by now we all know what the eventual outcome is going to be. You’re going to have to shut the thing down.”
“Shut it down!” Hammond stood angrily. “This is ridiculous.”
Malcolm shrugged, indifferent to Hammond’s outburst. “I’ve brought copies of my original paper for you to look at,” he said. “The original consultancy paper I did for InGen. The mathematics are a bit sticky, but I can walk you through it. Are you leaving now?”
“I have some phone calls to make,” Hammond said, and went into the adjoining cabin.
“Well, it’s a long flight,” Malcolm said to the others. “At least my paper will give you something to do.”
The plane flew through the night.
Grant knew that Ian Malcolm had his share of detractors, and he could understand why some found his style too abrasive, and his applications of chaos theory too glib. Grant thumbed through the paper, glancing at the equations.
Gennaro said, “Your paper concludes that Hammond’s island is bound to fail?”
“Correct.”
“Because of chaos theory?”
“Correct. To be more precise, because of the behavior of the system in phase space.”
Gennaro tossed the paper aside and said, “Can you explain this in English?”
“Surely,” Malcolm said. “Let’s see where we have to start. You know what a nonlinear equation is?”
“No.”
“Strange attractors?”
“No.”
“All right,” Malcolm said. “Let’s go back to the beginning.” He paused, staring at the ceiling. “Physics has had great success at describing certain kinds of behavior: planets in orbit, spacecraft goingto the moon, pendulums and springs and rolling balls, that sort of thing. The regular movement of objects. These are described by what are called linear equations, and mathematicians can solve those equations easily. We’ve been doing it for hundreds of years.”
“Okay,” Gennaro said.
“But there is another kind of behavior, which physics handles badly. For example, anything to do with turbulence. Water coming out of a spout. Air moving over an airplane wing. Weather. Blood flowing through the heart. Turbulent events are described by nonlinear equations. They’re hard to solve—in fact, they’re usually impossible to solve. So physics has never understood this whole class of events. Until about ten years ago. The new theory that describes them is called chaos theory.
“Chaos theory originally grew out of attempts to make computer models of weather in the 1960s. Weather is a big complicated system, namely the earth’s atmosphere as it interacts with the land and the sun. The behavior of this big complicated system always defied understanding. So naturally we couldn’t predict weather. But what the early researchers learned from computer models was that, even if you could understand it, you still couldn’t predict it. Weather prediction is absolutely impossible. The reason is that the behavior of the system is sensitively dependent on initial conditions.”
“You lost me,” Gennaro said.
“If I use a cannon to fire a shell of a certain weight, at a certain speed, and a certain angle of inclination—and if I then fire a second shell with almost the same weight, speed, and angle—what
given
that you will behave like this,
given
that you will care about that. No one thinks about the givens. Isn’t it amazing? In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought.”
Hammond turned to Gennaro and raised his hands. “You invited him.”
“And a lucky thing, too,” Malcolm said. “Because it sounds as if you have a serious problem.”
“We have no problem,” Hammond said quickly.
“I always maintained this island would be unworkable,” Malcolm said. “I predicted it from the beginning.” He reached into a soft leather briefcase. “And I trust by now we all know what the eventual outcome is going to be. You’re going to have to shut the thing down.”
“Shut it down!” Hammond stood angrily. “This is ridiculous.”
Malcolm shrugged, indifferent to Hammond’s outburst. “I’ve brought copies of my original paper for you to look at,” he said. “The original consultancy paper I did for InGen. The mathematics are a bit sticky, but I can walk you through it. Are you leaving now?”
“I have some phone calls to make,” Hammond said, and went into the adjoining cabin.
“Well, it’s a long flight,” Malcolm said to the others. “At least my paper will give you something to do.”
The plane flew through the night.
Grant knew that Ian Malcolm had his share of detractors, and he could understand why some found his style too abrasive, and his applications of chaos theory too glib. Grant thumbed through the paper, glancing at the equations.
Gennaro said, “Your paper concludes that Hammond’s island is bound to fail?”
“Correct.”
“Because of chaos theory?”
“Correct. To be more precise, because of the behavior of the system in phase space.”
Gennaro tossed the paper aside and said, “Can you explain this in English?”
“Surely,” Malcolm said. “Let’s see where we have to start. You know what a nonlinear equation is?”
“No.”
“Strange attractors?”
“No.”
“All right,” Malcolm said. “Let’s go back to the beginning.” He paused, staring at the ceiling. “Physics has had great success at describing certain kinds of behavior: planets in orbit, spacecraft goingto the moon, pendulums and springs and rolling balls, that sort of thing. The regular movement of objects. These are described by what are called linear equations, and mathematicians can solve those equations easily. We’ve been doing it for hundreds of years.”
“Okay,” Gennaro said.
“But there is another kind of behavior, which physics handles badly. For example, anything to do with turbulence. Water coming out of a spout. Air moving over an airplane wing. Weather. Blood flowing through the heart. Turbulent events are described by nonlinear equations. They’re hard to solve—in fact, they’re usually impossible to solve. So physics has never understood this whole class of events. Until about ten years ago. The new theory that describes them is called chaos theory.
“Chaos theory originally grew out of attempts to make computer models of weather in the 1960s. Weather is a big complicated system, namely the earth’s atmosphere as it interacts with the land and the sun. The behavior of this big complicated system always defied understanding. So naturally we couldn’t predict weather. But what the early researchers learned from computer models was that, even if you could understand it, you still couldn’t predict it. Weather prediction is absolutely impossible. The reason is that the behavior of the system is sensitively dependent on initial conditions.”
“You lost me,” Gennaro said.
“If I use a cannon to fire a shell of a certain weight, at a certain speed, and a certain angle of inclination—and if I then fire a second shell with almost the same weight, speed, and angle—what
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