Editorial - Chaos

Hello, Dear Reader, and welcome to Issue 21 of Consilience.

This issue is devoted to exploring the theme of chaos.

What happens when the outcomes of our lives hinge on small, seemingly inconsequential decisions? As precise as mathematics may feel, with its definite problems and answers, there is a branch devoted to studying when precision unravels into unpredictability: chaos theory.

For the Greeks, chaos was the primordial void – a state of total potential, where everything and nothing coexisted. To the Egyptians and Mesopotamians, it was symbolised by water and ocean – vast, shifting forces. In contemporary science, chaos often represents complexity beyond our capacity to measure or predict, from turbulent weather to ecosystems and economies. The butterfly effect – where a single flap might shift the trajectory of a hurricane – is now an emblem for sensitive dependence on initial conditions. And in this issue, it becomes a metaphor for poetry.

Here, the flutter of a line or the breath of an image may redirect entire emotional climates.

In Issue 21, you will encounter work from science poets across the world. They are astrophysicists, librarians, ecopoets, cultural workers, songwriters, educators, psychotherapists, engineers, policy analysts, and more.

Their poems wrestle with entropy, emergence, instability, and identity. You will find meditations on beginnings and ends, on how a lecture or a dream shifts a life. There are poems that reimagine creation, that map disorder into song, that ask what it means to resist, adapt, and evolve. In some, chaos is ecological; in others, it is emotional or interpersonal. Whether in the form of experimental fragmentation or lyrical invocation, each piece carries its own tension between pattern and unpredictability.

As these pieces suggest, being sensitive to how our day starts is not only for creative writers. Weather systems, like memories and moods, hinge on small beginnings. The Consilience team invites you to sail with us into this wide sea of uncertainty – and to see, in these poems, how disorder gives rise to unexpected meaning.

The Consilience Team