Science and Chaos

We often imagine science as the art of order: equations on a board, graphs, predictions. But the world that science meets at the threshold is not orderly. It is chaos, not just mess or confusion, but a zone of infinite speed where forms flicker into existence and vanish before they can be named. The question is: how does science ever gain a grip on such a world? The answer proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their 1991 book What is Philosophy? is striking. Science does not conquer chaos, it slows it down.

Facing chaos

Chaos is not simply disorder, it’s the infinite speed at which every form appears and disappears. Science faces chaos by slowing it down, creating limits that make things measurable and comparable. These limits hold chaos still just long enough for observation and calculation. What emerges are relations between independent variables that Deleuze and Guattari call functions.

A function is a kind of slow motion. If chaos is a blur, science builds frames to catch its movement. This slowing isn’t a side effect but the condition that makes phenomena visible at all. Even the fastest accelerations or cosmic expansions rely on this primary stilling that gives speed meaning.

A limit is not a boundary but what makes a thing possible - the speed of light, absolute zero, Planck’s constant, these are thresholds that define how matter and energy can exist. Once such limits are set, science constructs coordinate systems that let variables be related and tracked. Each frame - thermodynamic, relativistic, quantum - opens a different space of reference.

From here, science advances by linking variables through functions, each describing a state of affairs. Calculus captures how change happens at its smallest instant, turning the blur of chaos into measurable motion. Across its history, science evolves not by accumulation but by transformation: Newton gives way to Einstein, Euclidean space to Riemannian geometry. Each new framework invents its own limits, its own coordinates, and with them, a new vision of the world.

Think of a simple example like weather forecasting. Meteorologists select specific variables like temperature, air pressure, humidity, wind speed, and impose clear boundaries on these variables (measuring temperature in degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit at regular intervals across specific locations). In doing so, they stabilize chaos into measurable, predictable data. The swirling complexity of the atmosphere becomes a set of patterns we can read and project forward, allowing us to forecast weather even as its underlying reality remains endlessly dynamic and unpredictable.

Science and invention

For Deleuze and Guattari, a scientist does not discover - a scientist invents. By insisting that science is about the invention of functions that slow chaos down, they push back against the idea that science simply uncovers truths already out there in nature. The scientist’s task is not to reveal something hidden but to create new ways of relating things, new frameworks that make phenomena intelligible. This act of invention is what they call the creation of functions.

Functions, understood this way, appear whenever at least two aggregates - two sets of data, events, or phenomena - are placed in a regulated relationship. Science begins when someone says: “these two kinds of things are connected, and here’s how their relationship behaves.” That’s what a mathematical function does (relating x to y), and it’s also what scientific modeling does - linking variables through laws, equations, or probabilities. Think of linking temperature and altitude, speed and energy, or even supply and demand. Each pairing translates the fluid complexity of the world into a stable relation that can be studied, tested, and revised.

So when Deleuze and Guattari say that a scientist “creates functions,” they means that science works by constructing relations, by establishing correlations, dependencies, or mappings between different aggregates. Functions are invented frameworks that give structure to chaos and allow us to describe and predict reality.

By contrast, philosophy, they say, is concerned not with functions but with concepts. A philosopher doesn’t just reflect on meaning (asking general questions like What is the meaning of life? Does God exist? What is justice?), but tries to think new forms of meaning, new modes of understanding or experiencing the world. Science creates functions (relations that can be tested and measured), while philosophy creates concepts (new ways of thinking or perceiving).

That’s why Deleuze and Guattari say “fortunately, philosophy exists.” Each domain, science and philosophy, has its own kind of creation. Scientists create functions that stabilize and make sense of phenomena; philosophers create concepts that make sense of thought itself. Both are acts of invention, but they invent different kinds of things.

Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows, 1890

Another approach to chaos

Where science meets chaos by slowing it down and giving it reference, art takes another path. It gives chaos a sensory presence, it lets us feel it rather than understand or measure it. For Deleuze and Guattari, art is not the outpouring of an artist’s inner life but the extraction of sensations that stand on their own: they call it percepts and affects. Percepts are perceptions freed from a perceiver. Affects are emotions freed from an individual feeler. Joined together they form a bloc of sensations - a compact, self-supporting reality that persists as long as the work persists.

Art preserves what would otherwise vanish at infinite speed. A smile on a canvas, a gust of wind in paint, a chord that still vibrates after the musician has left - these are not copies or private memories. They endure as new events. The young man will smile for as long as the canvas lasts; the wind keeps shaking the painted branch; the scene resumes each time we open a novel or replay a piece of music. This is why Deleuze and Guattari call artworks monuments: not because they commemorate a past, but because they make a present that can be visited again and again.

Art does not measure or reference chaos, t composes consistency at speed. The world rushes by. Art arrests nothing, but composes something that can be returned to as if for the first time. By composing sensations that give consistency to chaos without measuring or defining it, the arts work like laboratories that loosen rigid structures of meaning - stable identities, fixed hierarchies, representational habits - and encourage flows and transformations. A percept isn’t what someone sees, but a perception that stands on its own - the colour, light, or rhythm that continues to exist even when no one is looking. Likewise, an affect is not a private emotion but an intensity that moves through the work - the trembling, joy, or tension that a painting or a piece of music carries in itself.

In Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows, nothing is described or represented in the ordinary sense. The swirling sky, the trembling wheat, and the dark crows do not reproduce a view of nature but preserve a vibration of life itself. The wind, the light, the tension of the scene, everything that would normally vanish in an instant, are held together in a single, enduring sensation. The brushstrokes don’t imitate movement; they are movement, captured in color and texture.

Science, philosophy, and art are not separate pursuits but complementary responses to the same condition - the flux of a world always on the verge of vanishing. Science gives chaos structure, philosophy gives it sense, and art gives it feeling. Each, in its own way, invents a rhythm that allows life to endure within the storm.