La historia y la teoría del caos

This book, part manual and part essay, is an attempt to provide students and teachers with an understanding of the development of physics and history as disciplines since antiquity. While physics is the quintessence of science as it seeks to explain a range of regular and periodic phenomena, history has developed under the stigma of inferior learning. Until the mid-twentieth century, physics represented the paradigm of all that is knowable, measurable, and predictable in the universe, based in mathematical abstraction and the determination of the fundamental laws of nature. However, more recently, the existence of chance, probability, and indeterminism in natural phenomena has been recognized, aspects that history as a discipline has long since recognized. Thus, these denominators common to both disciplines allow for a new dialogue between the two. As physics abandons strict determinism, it becomes more flexible and can draw closer to other sciences: determinism ceases to be the standard by which science is measured. These common denominators enable both history and physics to attempt to understand phenomena in which the contingent and the random prevail, and where the development of the processes cannot be defined in advance. If physics can use chaos theory to seek explanations for this type phenomenon, then history can aim to do the same, and to test how far this theory can be used to explain phenomena of a historical nature, for example, using the "bifurcation tree" to explain changes, leaps, or deviations in historical processes in which random breaks occur. The scope of this book, however, is to demonstrate that dialogue between these two disciplines begins with the recognition of the existence of chance. Heading =======