Abstract
The chemical community today views chemical chaos much as it did chemical oscillation 20 to 30 years ago. There are a number of “enlightened” students of and believers in the phenomenon, but the vast majority of chemists are either ignorant of or skeptical about the possibility of genuine chaos in a well-controlled chemical system.
Major developments in the understanding of periodic chemical oscillation, including the recent systematic design of a new family of oscillators, are reviewed. The question of how closely linked periodic and chaotic behavior are in chemical system is considered briefly, and implications for the design of chaotic systems are noted.
Two systems are considered in some detail. The first, earlier reported as a photochemical oscillator and/or chaotic reaction, is shown to be a system of hydrodynamic rather than chemical interest. The second, one of the newly designed family of chlorite oscillators, exhibits many of the features found in experiments on chaos in the Belousov-Zhabotinskii reaction. It illustrates the close relation between complex periodic oscillations and chaos. Both examples serve to point out the origins of the present controversy over the existence of chemical chaos.