Chaos

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I'm moving the rating up a bit after my re-read (on audio) because it wasn't that bad, although I still think it's a bit overrated.

Chaos theory is a relatively new field in physics, and deals with simple and complex causes that react to one another. In fairness, there was a long gap where I put this book down after having read the first half, so I recognize that I lost the continuity of the narrative. Admittedly it was rich in stories of key figures and their personalities, but lacking in a clear and concise explanation of chaos.

I realised how much I was enjoying the book when I found myself twiddling my thumbs one lunch hour at work and decided to plot a simple bifurcation chart! Now that these kind of doing science was quit established, other disciplines began to join the league, looking for solutions to problems which they previously lacked the adequate tools. It describes the Mandelbrot set, Julia sets, and Lorenz attractors without using complicated mathematics. For an elegant and comprehensive discussion of complexity theory, read Stephen Wolfram's ground-breaking work A NEW KIND OF SCIENCE published a decade ago and still making the news. Uncover one of the most exciting frontiers of modern physics in this fascinating, insightful and accessible overview of Chaos theory.

Chaos: Making a New Science was a 1987 National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize nominee, and has been translated into eighteen languages.Then, you may wind up contemplating how much of that migration was due to Jeff Goldblum's ham-fisted illustrations in "Jurassic Park". It is interesting to contemplate how much of the themes of this book have migrated into the modern cultural consciousness. The few things that kept being used as examples were the motion of water in a stream (fluid dynamics), or air tubulence. It came too early which is reflected in the imprecision and shallow quality of Gleick's discussion, which can be frustratingly confusing at times. To tackle this issue, physicists looked at Turbulence, being the complex phenomenon par excellence, an analogy between the start of turbulence in a stream and the phase transition of liquids provided a good start.

I think anyone remotely curious in science and physics, and in particular topics like uncertainty, randomness, nonlinearities, etc. Bits of biographies from here and there and merged in little chapters which actually don't tell you anything useful/ informative about the science of chaos theory.A work of popular science in the tradition of Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, this 20th-anniversary edition of James Gleick’s groundbreaking bestseller Chaos introduces a whole new readership to chaos theory, one of the most significant waves of scientific knowledge in our time. And this ultimately was the real achievement of Gleick in writing Chaos - He manages to convey to us that this is the first foray of science into the realm of art - not just of explaining art but of being art.

This is one of the first books that was ever written on the chaos theory, and has also been nominated for various book prizes. I bought this book because I wanted to be a little bit like the fictional mathematician and chaos theorist Dr.

In an apparent coincidence, a small number of unrelated people became interested in studying aperiodic, non-linear problems arising in various fields of science all at roughly the same time. A mathematician turned meteorologist, Edward Lorenz, builds a "toy weather" on what's still a fairly early computer in the early 1960s, and in working with the parameters, concludes that long-term weather forecasting is doomed--a simple deterministic system is producing unpredictable results. Since most of mathematics was done by proof, this was very new inside of the field itself, and quit the breakthrough.