Local Business : the Manhattan Project and Chaos Theory By Dorothy Vanderford , University of Nevada , Las Vegas
What do kitchenware advertisements , a television comedy about scientists , a punk music album cover , and a rustic cabin in the New Mexico wilderness all have in common ? They are some of many thousands of visual representations of the Manhattan Project , an Americanled , secret military plan that relied on the minds of scientists from around the world to create a weapon to end WWII . The U . S . Army Corps of Engineers controlled the Project from August 13 , 1942 until August 1 , 1946 ( DOE ). Visual references to the Manhattan Project in popular culture from the 1940s to the present offer an example of chaos theory , which , in this paper , is understood as the existence of patterned interconnectedness between apparently random events and ideas . 1
Many readers will recognize repeated “ atomic ” patterns in categories such as housewares , toys , music , art , drama , and literature , although few will have my particular sensitivity to the topic : each time I see an atomic image , I recall my family history in relation to its development . I am particularly aware of cultural reflections of the importance 1
This paper is constrained to a non-scientific , non-mathematical , brief discussion of chaos theory as Edward Lorenz defines it in his book The Essence of Chaos and John Briggs and F . David Peat apply it in their book Seven Life Lessons of Chaos .
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