plateau , where they experienced muddy spring times , cold winters , humble living conditions , and severely restricted and controlled personal freedom of movement and speech beyond the gates of Los Alamos . After the bombs ’ deployment in Japan , Americans started realizing the impact of the devastating explosions when a 1946 New Yorker article by John Hersey exposed the damage the bombs caused in Hiroshima and Nagasaki . After deployment , the form of the Project morphed as each new strange attractor — an event or phenomenon that alters the course of an apparently contained system — caused a change in popular atomic consciousness .
A complete explanation of chaos theory comprises multiple definitions , only a few of which will be discussed here . An important concept for this discussion of visual representations of the Manhattan Project is the fractal as reproduction of an image ( e . g ., triangle , tree ) in which component parts mirror the original but the total number of new iterations , even as they become smaller individually , manifest in a very large number branched from the initial condition . Lorenz calls this phenomenon “ self-similarity ” ( 170 ), by which he means that the repeated parts continue to resemble the whole . He applies his discussion of fractals to a tree drawn by computer or by hand , using measurements to demonstrate what a fractal image might look like as its form branches infinitely — all the while maintaining a similar pattern to the first tree . He demonstrates how fractals can look random when they are not , and appear orderly when they are actually random ( 174 ). He asserts that some fractals appear complex but are in fact operating under simple rules , and he finds the connection between fractals and chaos to be the strange attractor , writing , “ strange attractors are fractals ” ( 176 ).
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