Chapter ID: CBB086255881

Chaotic Fictions: Nonlinear Effects in Victorian Science and Literature (2017)

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The third and final part, “Strange Energies: Reconceptualizing the Physical Universe,” moves the volume’s focus from an observational study of the natural world to the abstract field of theoretical physics and unseen phenomena. Long before the technological developments of electron microscopes and particle accelerators, the Victorians were tackling the problem of how to detect and demonstrate the structure of unseen forces. Barri Gold identifies one such method as “nonlinear reasoning,” a way of thinking about apparently random natural systems. In her reading of “chaotic fictions” by such writers as Alfred Tennyson, Herbert Spencer, James Prescott Joule, and Charles Dickens, she identifies structures that uncannily anticipate key ideas in twentieth-century chaos theory, such as fractals, butterfly effects, and sensitive dependence on initial conditions. (From Introduction, page 11)

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Book Lara Pauline Karpenko; Shalyn Rae Claggett (2016) Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age. unapi

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Authors & Contributors
Hollander, Rachel
Badolato, Elizabeth
Wilmer, Clive
Shearer, Emily Carroll
Purton, Valerie
Nys, Michiel
Concepts
Science and literature
Evolution
Popular culture
Poetry and poetics
Science and culture
Psychology
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
Places
Great Britain
England
Institutions
Royal Society of London
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