Approaching complexity

Abstract

In 1974 a Faraday Symposium¹ was held at the Royal Institution on the subject of ‘The Physical Chemistry of Oscillatory Processes’. That timely event brought together an international group of specialists in the newly developing, interdisciplinary research field of oscillations, chemical waves and other ‘exotic’ phenomena. In the 21 years since the Symposium, our understanding of many fundamental properties of such behaviour has deepened through the application of advances in pure and applied mathematics in collaboration with experimental studies based in many physical, biological and engineering contexts, with the physical chemist being preeminent, exploiting the natural ‘non-linearities’ in chemical kinetics. This account illustrates how these ideas have been applied and developed through two specific examples: the route to chaos in the oxidation of carbon monoxide and the experimental challenge posed by Alan Turing's predictions of chemical patterns.