Inspired scientists change the whole landscape.

As it tends to happen in any major change of scientific paradigm, the very first chaos theorists behaved more like evangelists than scientists. They knew very deep inside that there was something wrong with the traditional way to understand the world. They (we) had come across too many random, irregular facts that did not fit into the neat picture of a classical theory dominated by reductionism, determinism and, above all, a mechanistic oversimplification. Reality was far more complex than that, and they knew it. However, they had no alternative theoretical model (that is, a paradigm) that could account for the new complex reality they saw.

The first chaos theorists, the scientists who set the discipline in motion, shared certain sensibilities. They had an eye for pattern, especially pattern that appeared on different scales at the same time. They had a taste for randomness and complexity, for jagged edges and sudden leaps. Believers in chaos -and they sometimes call themselves believers, or converts, or evangelists- speculate about determinism and free will, about evolution, about the nature of conscious intelligence. They feel that they are turning back a trend in science toward reductionism, the analysis of systems in terms of their constituent parts:quarks, chromosomes, or neurons. They believe that they are looking for the whole. (...) As one physicist put it: "Relativity eliminated the Newtonian illusion of absolute space and time; quantum theory eliminated the Newtonian dream of a controllable measurement process; and chaos eliminates the Laplacian fantasy of deterministic predictability".

(Gleick: pp. 5-6)

It is important to stress that the whole new paradigm of chaos theory was born more of a philosophical, religious or personal conviction than from real scientific evidence. After all, it cannot be an accident that at the very same time the idea of holism was also spreading throughout most Western countries to counter what was then viewed as the excessive mechanicism of our sciencitific endeavors. However, this is not to say that the chaos theorists lent themselves to the sort of wild theorizations that might characterize peoples in other fields such as philosophy or the social sciences. Far from that, their approach was always scientific in the sense that they made an effort to find the facts that would back up their ideas. It is important to keep this in mind in order to avoid the sort of exaggerate generalizations the New Age tends to do with chaos theory (and systems theory in general). A new paradigm can only be investigated into and promoted by people who are willing to break apart from the classical theories, but that is not to say (as we often hear and read) that the discoveries of the chaos theorists were already predicted by the great masters of Hinduism or Buddhism centuries ago. That is not only an oversimplification but also plainly false, the sort of make-believe that is so widespread among certain quarters of our pop culture. In spite of it all, this breakthrough does emphasize the importance of ideas and other sources of inspiration even in something as dry as the scientific work.