Chaos: Making a New Science

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A new start at Los Alamos. The renormalization group. Decoding color. The rise of numerical experimentation. Mitchell Feigenbaum’s breakthrough. A universal theory. The rejection letters. Meeting in Como. Clouds and paintings. Lewis, Peter H. (February 11, 1995). "Performance Systems Buys Pipeline Network". The New York Times . Retrieved March 23, 2009.

My big grievance with this book is it falls too short. His narrative is compelling, yes, the stories are interesting, sure, but he doesn't grab the central characters as well as a new journalist like John McPhee does. He floats too far above the actual science and complexity. He shows you pictures and dances around the pools of chaos and clouds of complexity, but never actually puts the reader INTO the churning water or shoots the reader into energized, cumuliform heaps. National Book Awards - 1987". Chaos: Making a New Science. National Book Foundation . Retrieved 28 May 2011. Pepinsky, Hal (Spring 1990). "Reproducing Violence: A Review Essay". Social Justice. 17 (1 (39)): 155–172. ISSN 1043-1578. JSTOR 29766530. A problem for God. Transitions in the laboratory. Rotating cylinders and a turning point. David Ruelle’s idea for turbulence. Loops in phase space. Mille-feuilles and sausage. An astronomer’s mapping. “Fireworks or galaxies.” Psinet to Sell Consumer Internet Division". The New York Times. July 2, 1996 . Retrieved March 23, 2009.Hilborn, Robert C. (November 1988). "Chaos, Making a New Science". American Journal of Physics. 56 (11): 1053–1054. Bibcode: 1988AmJPh..56.1053G. doi: 10.1119/1.15345. ISSN 0002-9505. Here’s the key message: Meteorologist Edward Lorenz became the intellectual father of chaos theory after discovering the unpredictability of weather.

His next books included two biographies, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, and Isaac Newton, which John Banville said would "surely stand as the definitive study for a very long time to come." [23] However, apart from all these philosophical implications about life, I really wanted to learn a bit of science behind chaos theory. This is my 2nd attempt at this book almost 2 years later and the book is still uninteresting as it was before. I believe this is one of the most "overrated" books out there. The book is hugely popular, always comes at first when you are looking for recommendations about chaos theory books. So, first time I really had doubts about myself. I thought maybe I am not doing justice to this book. I still had my doubts this time. So, I spent substantial amount of my time behind this book. And I think I have done enough and cannot do anything more for this book. And the car accident scene from "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldoHL...The book could have benefited from a lecture style presentation, with clear chapter introductions and summaries, so that I could see how it all fit together, not to mention what year he was currently talking about. Frankly a visual Timeline would have done wonders. Kendig, Frank (1987-10-15). "Books: Third Scientific Revolution of the Century (Published 1987)". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 2020-12-22. Chaos: Making a new science". Long Range Planning. 22 (5): 152. October 1989. doi: 10.1016/0024-6301(89)90186-6. 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. And maybe, just maybe (highly doubtful!!)I'm just not smart enough to get it. Still, a whole lot more could have been done to illustrate the application and implications of the subject. I also didn't care for the tone of the brief profiles of the various physicists and mathematicians - it felt like name-dropping to me.

My interest in chaos theory and butterfly effect has been purely philosophical. I guess the idea of alternate reality always intrigues me. May be fueled by its implication in popular culture, movies, or books. First time, when I read Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder", I was really moved by the idea how something very small might eventually affect something greater at later phases. Lorenz dubbed it the butterfly effect. This means systems like our weather are so sensitive to small disturbances that a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing today could be responsible for a raging storm next month in New York. In science-speak, this is also known as “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” – and it became the cornerstone of the new field of chaos theory. They’d no idea how fragile, unstable, and chaotic physical systems like the Earth’s weather really are. It took a mathematically-minded meteorologist to demonstrate this. All-in-all it reads like pop-science with constant over-the-top enthusiasm in place of a clear, concise, solid explanation of what chaos is. Bolch, Ben W. (January 1989). "Review of Chaos: Making a New Science". Southern Economic Journal. 55 (3): 779–780. doi: 10.2307/1059589. ISSN 0038-4038. JSTOR 1059589.Of course, they knew that it was hard to get perfect measurements on something as complicated as the weather. But they thought that with good enough data and a lot of computer power, it would be possible to calculate the weather for months ahead – at least roughly. The complex plane. Surprise in Newton’s method. The Mandelbrot set: sprouts and tendrils. Art and commerce meet science. Fractal basin boundaries. The chaos game. The book covers chaos theory under the lens of four themes: sensitive dependence on initial conditions, self-similarity, universality, and nonlinearity. [5] Balachandran, Balakumar; Hogan, John (June 1999). "Featured Review: So You Have Been Asked to Give a Lecture Course on the Applications of Nonlinear Dynamics..." SIAM Review. 41 (2): 375–382. ISSN 0036-1445. JSTOR 2653080.