Chaos Imagined

Martin Meisel is Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature Emeritus at Columbia University. He is the author of Shaw and the Nineteenth-Century Theater and Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts of the Nineteenth Century.

List of Illustrations OMEGA. Uncertainty and Complexity: An Untethered Epilogue After Entropy Incompleteness and Incongruity The Message of the Quantum Lost Horizons Chaos Everywhere Looking Askance Chaosmos 1. Shaping Chaos 2. Nothing and Something Something out of Nothing? Nothing in Something "The Nurse of Becoming" Saying Nothing Nothing as Nothing The Middle of Nowhere Positive Negation 3. Number: The One and the Many Division and Multiplication Sophocles' Thought Experiment Imagining the Worst Taking the Measure One World or Many? "Number-Worlds" A Glance Into the Abyss Truth and Poetry Sightlines Everything by One and One 4. Carnival Monstrous Confusion Going to the Fair Dreamworks Lords of Misrule Parody Refram'd The Wild God 5. War Representation Conscripting War Emblematics Condition Soldiers and Peasants: Callot Goya's Nightmare Dix and the Chaos Within Consummation Managing the Chaos The Fog of Battle Armageddon and Apocalypse 6. Energy Matter in Motion (Inertia, Friction, Noise) Statics and Dynamics The Homeostatic Universe Friction and Noise Nebular Hypotheses Energy Unbound Wirrwarr Petrific Chaos Energy's Epic Energy's Image Postlude: Energy's Acolytes 7. Entropy Time and Tide Conservation and Convertibility Double-Entry Physics The Death of the Universe Ancestral Voices A Question of Time A Sense of Direction Second Thoughts Tristes Entropics Nature Decay'd Chekhov's Fiddle Entartung Zola's Fevers Vox clamantis Anarchy and Endgame Resistance and Complementarity Beckett and the Shape of Chaos Sights and Sounds 8. Coda, or Da capo al fine Notes Bibliography Index