Chaotic Dynamics and Transport in Fluids and Plasmas (Research Trends in Physics)

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Summary: 'Order'and'Chaos'-Bohr's Complementarity
Review: RESEARCH TRENDS in PHYSICS ( V. Stefan , Series Editor) [Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk 164(7)781-782(1994)] Physics-Uspekhi 37(7)711-712(1994) This book is the proceedings of a conference,held in La Jolla and organized by The Institute for Advanced Physics Studies,the aim of which could be regarded as a restoration of the links between three fields in modern physics: chaotic dynamics, hydrodynamic turbulence, and plasma turbulence. The narrow specialization of modern scientists, related to the ever-increasing complexity of the research methods, has led to the situation in which although major advances have been made in the development of the mathematical formalism of nonlinear dynamics, there has been no significant progress in the understanding of the fundamental problems in the theory of highly developed turbulence which has the parent of nonlinear dynamics. It is obvious that a qualitative step forward in the understanding of the nature of turbulent dynamics is possible only if a new descriptive language is used, i.e. if this step is the development of nonperturbative methods for the description of chaos. The editor in chief of this volume is Ilya Prigogine, a Nobel Prize laureate. He has been largely responsible for the inclusion of a paradigm of the modern scientific knowledge of the concepts of 'self-organization or 'order out of chaos'. These concepts have been embodied in his work on thermodynamics of non-equilibrium systems, which is applicable even to such exotic issues as street traffic, stability of insect populations, and development of ordered biological structures, including cancer cells. Reading of this monograph creates an impression that chaos is simply an external manifestation of latent order. In scientific language the concepts of 'order' and 'chaos' can be regarded as complementary (in the sense given by Bohr) methods of describing our self-organizing world.