A great plane falls from the sky and takes 230 lives. The newspapers fill with stories of fate’s quirks. Thunderstorms kept another plane on the ground for four hours in Chicago. One of its passengers had a ticket on the doomed plane, which she missed by a few minutes. “Thank God,” she told a reporter. An unfortunate young man arranged to fly a package to Europe as a courier. He planned to visit his sweetheart in London. Joyful at his free ticket and filled with delicious anticipation, he met his death. What does it mean that destiny chose one to survive and the other to die?
Television and the press fill with stories responding to our fascination and horror at life’s uncertainties. What made TWA Flight 800 a target? Why did fate draw these particular people to their common destiny? Literature, great and otherwise, often treats of fate’s powers. The ancients believed that fate worked upon human character to produce inevitable tragedy. Thus honorable Oedipus seeks the truth to save his city and discovers the awful facts of parricide and incest. We moderns are more likely to think that fate strikes us random blows. In The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder sought the common threads that placed certain people on a collapsing bridge. In Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, fate is a prankster, while John Barth’s novels portray predestined malevolence.
For some centuries the progress of modern science has created the feeling that we, at last, were gaining some control over the unpredictable forces of nature. Ancient scourges, such as smallpox, are gone. The water is safe to drink. We have been secure from war on our soil, and we survive even natural disasters. Even so, many of us believe that our parents and grandparents led safer lives, and we fear that the future will only bring deterioration and danger.
Just as we must know what we are looking at to see it, so we must have the proper language to think about the natural world.
Until recently science, at least, had the reputation for unceasingly improving our ability to anticipate and mold the future. Now scientific discoveries themselves seem to undermine science’s credibility. Chaos theory, sensitive dependence on initial conditions, bizarre strange attractors, and the notorious butterfly effect afflict us. Scientists tell us that the tiniest disturbances in nature lead to wildly unpredictable outcomes. The foundations of physics, the most certain of all the sciences, settle in the liquefied soil of nonlinear systems.
A California butterfly flutters this way instead of that. A tiny parcel of unstable air bubbles skyward. But for the butterfly it would have stayed in its place. Soon a cloud appears. Beneath the cloud the ground cools in the shade while the southwestern sun sizzles the rest. Large swirls of warm air lift soaring birds and draw cooler air from the nearby sea. Each effect is the predictable consequence of its cause, but the result changes the weather sweeping eastward around the globe. As the unpredictable consequence, a great storm douses Rangoon. Are the world’s workings a Newtonian clock or a Rube Goldberg machine? […]
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