Chaos

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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. 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. 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.

The other day when the radio announcer reported the length of the Florida coastline, I found myself wondering what length measuring stick was used. The amazing pictures and illustrations and the quotes accompanying each chapter all add to the feeling of reading an art text book rather than a science book.A work of popular science in the tradition of Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, James Gleick’s groundbreaking bestseller Chaos introduces his readership to chaos theory, one of the most significant waves of scientific knowledge in our time. The content consists of a few badly written half-biographies, a few pretty pictures and vignettes of science, and no worthwhile mathematics whatsoever. Gleick's essays charting the growth of the Internet included the "Fast Forward" column on technology in the New York Times Magazine from 1995 to 1999 and formed the basis of his book What Just Happened.

Then, you may wind up contemplating how much of that migration was due to Jeff Goldblum's ham-fisted illustrations in "Jurassic Park". While he does exhibit a fair degree of sloppiness (``unbounded'' is not a synonym for ``infinite'', ``infinite'' does not mean ``quite big''), Chaos actually isn't all that bad as a fairly shallow introduction to chaos theory. I think anyone remotely curious in science and physics, and in particular topics like uncertainty, randomness, nonlinearities, etc.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. However, apart from all these philosophical implications about life, I really wanted to learn a bit of science behind chaos theory. 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.