| Prologue | 1 |
| The Butterfly Effect | 9 |
| Edward Lorenz and his toy weather | |
| The computer misbehaves | |
| Long-range forecasting is doomed | |
| Order masquerading as randomness | |
| A world of nonlinearity | |
| "We completely missed the point" | |
| Revolution | 33 |
| A revolution in seeing | |
| Pendulum clocks, space balls, and playground swings | |
| The invention of the horseshoe | |
| A mystery solved: Jupiter's Great Red Spot | |
| Life's Ups and Downs | 57 |
| Modeling wildlife populations | |
| Nonlinear science, "the study of non-elephant animals" | |
| Pitchfork bifurcations and a ride on the Spree | |
| A movie of chaos and a messianic appeal | |
| A Geometry of Nature | 81 |
| A discovery about cotton prices | |
| A refugee from Bourbaki | |
| Transmission errors and jagged shores | |
| New dimensions | |
| The monsters of fractal geometry | |
| Quakes in the schizosphere | |
| From clouds to blood vessels | |
| The trash cans of science | |
| "To see the world in a grain of sand" | |
| Strange Attractors | 119 |
| A problem for God | |
| Transitions in the laboratory | |
| Rotating cylinders and a turning point | |
| David Ruelle's idea for turbulence | |
| Loops in phase space | |
| Mille-feuilles and sausage | |
| An astronomer's mapping | |
| "Fireworks or galaxies" | |
| Universality | 155 |
| A new start at Los Alamos | |
| The renormalization group | |
| Decoding color | |
| The rise of numerical experimentation | |
| Mitchell Feigenbaum's break-through | |
| A universal theory | |
| The rejection letters | |
| Meeting in Como | |
| Clouds and paintings | |
| The Experimenter | 189 |
| Helium in a Small Box | |
| "Insolid billowing of the solid" | |
| Flow and form in nature | |
| Albert Libchaber's delicate triumph | |
| Experiment joins theory | |
| From one dimension to many | |
| Images of Chaos | 213 |
| The complex plane | |
| Surprise in Newton's method | |
| The Mandelbrot set: sprouts and tendrils | |
| Art and commerce meet science | |
| Fractal basin boundaries | |
| The chaos game | |
| The Dynamical Systems Collective | 241 |
| Santa Cruz and the sixties | |
| The analog computer | |
| Was this science? | |
| "A long-range vision" | |
| Measuring unpredictability | |
| Information theory | |
| From microscale to macroscale | |
| The dripping faucet | |
| Audiovisual aids | |
| An era ends | |
| Inner Rhythms | 273 |
| A misunderstanding about models | |
| The complex body | |
| The dynamical heart | |
| Resetting the biological clock | |
| Fatal arrhythmia | |
| Chick embryos and abnormal beats | |
| Chaos as health | |
| Chaos and Beyond | 301 |
| New beliefs, new definitions | |
| The Second Law, the snowflake puzzle, and loaded dice | |
| Opportunity and necessity | |
| Notes on Sources and Further Reading | 318 |
| Acknowledgments | 341 |
| Index | 343 |
