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
Bayley, Mel
Buckland, Adelene
Geric, Michelle
Henchman, Anna Alexandra
Holmes, John
Laidler, Keith James
Journals
Victorian Literature and Culture
Victorian Studies
British Society for the History of Mathematics Bulletin
Publishers
University of Virginia
Oxford University Press
Harvard University
University of California, Santa Cruz
Anthem Press
Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture
Concepts
Science and literature
Poetry and poetics
Evolution
Chaos theory; chaotic behavior
Public understanding of science
Popular culture
People
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord
Dickens, Charles
Darwin, Charles Robert
Eliot, George
Hardy, Thomas
Lyell, Charles
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
20th century
20th century, early
Places
Great Britain
England
Institutions
Royal Society of London
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