Chaos

Product Information

That being said, this felt like a good introduction to the early history of scientists' efforts to understand and explain nonlinear systems and the apparent chaotic behavior observed in natural and man-made systems. He’d heard about the Lorenz attractor, and he started playing around by plotting its equations on the big, analog computer on campus. Among the scientists Gleick profiled in the New York Times Magazine were Douglas Hofstadter, Stephen Jay Gould, Mitchell Feigenbaum, and Benoit Mandelbrot.

Instead, his mistake revealed how unstable, unpredictable, and chaotic these systems really could be. From time to time, on rare occasions, I would form a binary event tree of life and would try to figure out the initial events that accumulated into current condition of life. In Chaos, Gleick makes the story of chaos theory not only fascinating but also accessible to beginners, and opens our eyes to a surprising new view of the universe. The content consists of a few badly written half-biographies, a few pretty pictures and vignettes of science, and no worthwhile mathematics whatsoever.Then, you may wind up contemplating how much of that migration was due to Jeff Goldblum's ham-fisted illustrations in "Jurassic Park". Precisely because chaos was popping up all over, with just a few people in each of many different scientific fields, it was easy for scientists in any field to notice a paper or presentation, note the fact that is was completely different from the methods, logic, math that had relevance for their own work, that much of the work was in fact being done in other fields--and dismiss it. I finally read the book that ought to have been required reading for freshman physics majors for the past 20 years! So, thanks to James Gleick for that too- late realization and doing what the uninspired mathbots should have done years ago.

For instance, Mitchell Feigenbaum, who constructed and regulated his life by a 26-hour clock and watched his waking hours come in and out of phase with those of his coworkers at Los Alamos National Laboratory.It generated complexity: richly organized patterns, sometimes stable and sometimes unstable, sometimes finite and sometimes infinite, but always with the fascination of living things. The Pipeline was the first ISP to offer a graphical user interface, incorporating e-mail, chat, Usenet, and the World Wide Web, through software for Windows and Mac operating systems. Shaw could adjust the variables of the equations by turning knobs on the computer, and it helped him visualize the sensitive dependence on the initial conditions Lorenz had discovered. Freeman Dyson praised the book for its popular account but critiqued the omitting of the earlier work of Dame Mary L. Because of this book, and the many delights that have followed, I am a lover of popular science writing.

The Information is by no means an easy read, but if you have some previous knowledge of physics(mine came from having read Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of something or other and a biography of e = mc2 but I suspect a bit of patience and wikipedia would also be just fine), you should be able to get through this without any major confusion. The kind of book that just blows your mind with how cool it all is, and why doesn't anyone teach science like THIS. From Edward Lorenz’s discovery of the Butterfly Effect, to Mitchell Feigenbaum’s calculation of a universal constant, to Benoit Mandelbrot’s concept of fractals, which created a new geometry of nature, Gleick’s engaging narrative focuses on the key figures whose genius converged to chart an innovative direction for science. James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era's defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.

Gleick's books include the international bestsellers Chaos: Making a New Science (1987) and The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood (2011). Pattern formation has become a branch of physics and of materials science, allowing scientists to model the aggregation of particles into clusters, the fractured spread of electrical discharges, and the growth of crystals in ice and metal alloys. The most interesting chapters were the final two, about the possible application to physiology and then a summary of the concept.