Chaos

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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.

So I got exactly what I was looking for and now I can talk about chaos theory Jurassic Park style, which is all I wanted. Numerous theories of Mitchell J Feigenbaum and D'arcy Thompson are discussed in an elaborate manner, while also taking into account their historical background. Not to mention galaxy formation, fingerprints, shells, coastlines, or the thing that made the little dinos get the upper hand in those movies. But there are always chances that changes in initial condition might accumulate into something different. This burn of the natural world, this magic of the unknown, is what draws me to read physics and philosophy as an absolute amature.

Thus I was disappointed that the focus was on a sequence of semi-biographies of the scientists as they discovered aspects of chaos.

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. 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.

James Gleick was born in New York and began his career in journalism, working as an editor and reporter for the New York Times. It's a case study in political factions and egos, sometimes cooperation and always wonder at seeing the world in a new way. As the author says, there are 3 revolutions in the science of the 20th century: relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos.

Newton was okay for some things but all these new equations describe just HOW little uncertainties can create huge chaotic messes. This is a book that is more about translating the story of the science (not the science) for NOT the layman, but really the lazy layman. And I have one favorite comic story "Daytripper" which depicts so many alternate deaths a man can die in his life. I bought this book because I wanted to be a little bit like the fictional mathematician and chaos theorist Dr.Gleick collaborated with the photographer Eliot Porter on Nature's Chaos and with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software.

Since most of mathematics was done by proof, this was very new inside of the field itself, and quit the breakthrough. The author mentions these concepts but without going into lucid examples of what chaos theory implies for them. 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. However, apart from all these philosophical implications about life, I really wanted to learn a bit of science behind chaos theory.Their work led to other new discoveries, the most important of them is their independence from scale. Each stumbling step, each misguided attempt and every remonstration expected in such a new endeavor is traced out in loving detail and these scientists come alive as insecure dramers daring to step beyond the realms of the possible. I think anyone remotely curious in science and physics, and in particular topics like uncertainty, randomness, nonlinearities, etc. Still, a whole lot more could have been done to illustrate the application and implications of the subject.