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Either way, it appears that the bomber used our intelligence-gathering system to slip into the base and kill the people who orchestrated the intelligence gathering. In so doing, he delivered the worst blow ever suffered by the drone program. He found the flesh in our unmanned air force, seduced it, and slaughtered it.

Score one for the bad guys. The next move is ours.

But as Revel astutely notes, the deeper bond is what he calls the "excommunication of modernity," a mark of the left going back to the primitivist and anti-civilizational musings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Islamists understand this commonality as well: Among the doctrinal sources cited by Osama bin Laden, one finds not only the Quran but also the works of Noam Chomsky.

Anyone who thinks the totalitarian temptation lies buried in Lenin's mausoleum would do well to read this book, a fitting literary capstone in the career of one of France's true immortals.

The social characteristic of deciding who to trust is a key feature of authority — were you to say “I have it on good authority that Khotyn is a town in Moldova”, you’d be saying that you trust me to know and disclose that information accurately, not just because you trust me, but because some other group has vouched, formally or informally, for my trustworthiness.

This is a compressed telling, and swerves around many epistemological potholes, such as information that can’t be evaluated independently (”I love you”), information that is correct by definition (”The American Psychiatric Association says there is a mental disorder called psychosis”), or authorities making untestable propositions (”God hates it when you eat shrimp.”) Even accepting those limits, though, the assertion that Khotyn is in Moldova provides enough of an illustration here, because it’s false. Khotyn is in Ukraine.

And this is where authority begins to work its magic. If you told someone who knew better about the Moldovan town of Khotyn, and they asked where you got that incorrect bit of information, you’d have to say “Some guy on the internet said so.” See how silly you’d feel?

Algorithmic authority is the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying “Trust this because you trust me.” This model of authority differs from personal or institutional authority, and has, I think, three critical characteristics.

First, it takes in material from multiple sources, which sources themselves are not universally vetted for their trustworthiness, and it combines those sources in a way that doesn’t rely on any human manager to sign off on the results before they are published.

“It really is a problem of definition,” Ghose says. “This is what we as a community ultimately have to pin down: what we mean by quantum chaos.”

What this experiment has shown is that the actions that cause a difference in a system’s behavior on a classical level—a difference we would call chaos—cause a difference in a quantum system’s behavior as well. According to Ghose, that indicates that some underlying property is at the roots of chaos, a property that can produce hypersensitivity but whose definition shouldn’t be limited to it.