Chaos

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I found it quite informative, especially in communicating what it would perhaps be like working in science at an exciting time. This book tells of the journey of these scientists who challenged this mindset, and went to venture in this unexplored territories of science. It seems to me like this book represents a time in history before people had gotten accustom to handling complexity and information theory in computers.

Since most of mathematics was done by proof, this was very new inside of the field itself, and quit the breakthrough.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. The most interesting chapters were the final two, about the possible application to physiology and then a summary of the concept.

Cutting across several scientific disciplines, James Gleick explores and elucidates the science of the unpredicatable with an immensely readable narrative style and flair . Maybe I am just trying to figure out the initial conditions of a Hidden Markov Model with life's current visible outcome. I don't know if the leading thinkers on the subject would agree with this, but 'chaos theory' feels like a narrow slice of 'complexity theory' to me.Numerous theories of Mitchell J Feigenbaum and D'arcy Thompson are discussed in an elaborate manner, while also taking into account their historical background. Along the way are the fascinating stories of the rebellious scientists that had to challenge the establishment and who finally gained acceptance for their rigorous work.

The other day when the radio announcer reported the length of the Florida coastline, I found myself wondering what length measuring stick was used. Of course, we're all, yeah, we use those equations all the time now and it's old hat, but not so long ago, they were totally in left field and none of the big boys wanted to play with them. Now once the system is no longer periodic or predictable, we expect an erratic behavior which follows no pattern at all. While some may say this makes it a less informative book, for me this made it one of the most intriguing non-fiction books I have read. This book has been nominated for numerous book awards and widely acclaimed as one of the best books on chaos theory.Now of course in real life, things are much difficult, in many cases there are parameters which appear in both sides of the equation, making it second degree, a famous example being friction in the pendulum problem, which we disregard so often to keep things simple. Truly, though, this book does a great job at explaining and giving us the unusual history of the science that brought pure mathematics out of the clouds and back into the real world, dealing with our observable reality. 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.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.Gleick's book was first published in 1987, so I imagine by now there have been many developments and modifications to the ideas and theories presented here. Chaos: Making a New Science is a debut non-fiction book by James Gleick that initially introduced the principles and early development of the chaos theory to the public. As the author says, there are 3 revolutions in the science of the 20th century: relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos. Those with a background in physics, maths, astronomy or anything along those lines will probably feel they can appreciate some fairly significant concepts in the book. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.