Mixmaster Solution and Chaos

Many years ago D. M. (Prakash) Chitre wrote a paper on the chaotic character of the Mixmaster Universe solution to Einstein's equations. Now Myung et al. bring up this issue again.

I met Prakash when he was a postdoc in Jim Hartle's General Relativity group at UCSB. Now he works in industry in the US. When I went back to Mexico, at the Autonomous University of Puebla, I kept reading his papers. At the same time I was starting to get interested in chaos theory, so I told my friend Gerardo Torres del Castillo in Puebla, about this. Gerardo never got interested. I guess it is difficult to try to be involved in every single fashion that suits our fancy. Nevertheless I felt this was fundamental work. Imagine a natural source of uncertainty in classical gravitational theory.

Anyway, twenty years later I see that I may be right. Chaos Theory now is part of any field where non-linear equations appear. Chaos came to stay, it is not a passing fad.

I am glad that my friend Germán Aurelio Luna Acosta, also at Puebla, chose to make a career out of this insight. Of course he came to that conclusion all on his own. What saddens me is that Germán and Gerardo don't talk with each other. You know, one works in General Relativity, and the other in Dynamical Systems Theory, besides they are in different departments: and then I left Puebla.

So it goes.