Accelerated scientific advancements in the twentieth century have contributed

to the decline of belief in the mechanistic, rational, and supremely-ordered

Newtonian universe and have inspired themes of discontinuity and
unpredictability that are common tropes of postmodern literature. Twentiethcentury discoveries in science and logic, including Albert Einstein's Theory of
Relativity, Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Kurt Gdel's
Incompleteness Theorem, and the complexities of quantum physics have
contributed to a particular view of reality apparent in the works of John
Updike, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and others.
Taking cues from such theories, which realize natural barriers to scientific
knowledge even while opening hitherto unexplored areas of study, these and
many other writers and critics of the twentieth century have tended to apply
the concepts of randomness, uncertainty, and the breakdown of traditional
causality in their works. Other developments in science from the latter half of
the twentieth century have also contributed to the literary atmosphere of
postmodernism. Notable among these are the study of chaos theory, which
establishes the complex order of disorderly systems while positing their longterm unpredictability, and cybernetics, which views both humans and
machines as complex systems of informationideas analogous to those of
such writers as Italo Calvino, Don DeLillo, Stanislaw Lem, and Jacques
Derrida.