ABSTRACT
The physical sciences entered a period of dramatic change in the decades prior to the Second World War, in which physicists wrestled with and resolved many of the paradoxes presented by quantum mechanics. The second half of the twentieth century was no less dramatic, if somewhat less successful, in overcoming the challenges of complexity. Anomalous diffusion had been experimentally observed; the significance of nonlinear dynamics and the implications of chaos theory were being rigorously explored and rapidly diffusing through the science community, and the importance of fractal geometry was introduced, as a way to capture the complexity of a world that Euclid did not, and could not, have imagined. The loss of predictability in deterministic nonlinear dynamic phenomena was becoming widely accepted, and the notion that this would provide a useful way to describe biomedical phenomena was also being adopted, albeit at a slower pace.
