Chaos

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Freeman Dyson praised the book for its popular account but critiqued the omitting of the earlier work of Dame Mary L. This book tells of the journey of these scientists who challenged this mindset, and went to venture in this unexplored territories of science. Featured Review: So You Have Been Asked to Give a Lecture Course on the Applications of Nonlinear Dynamics. Precisely because chaos was popping up all over, with just a few people in each of many different scientific fields, it was easy for scientists in any field to notice a paper or presentation, note the fact that is was completely different from the methods, logic, math that had relevance for their own work, that much of the work was in fact being done in other fields--and dismiss it.

James Gleick was born in New York and began his career in journalism, working as an editor and reporter for the New York Times. 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 kind of book that just blows your mind with how cool it all is, and why doesn't anyone teach science like THIS. To be honest I'd say it's not for the faint-hearted but if you're "into" this kind of thing then you'll most likely enjoy "Chaos". As the author says, there are 3 revolutions in the science of the 20th century: relativity, quantum mechanics, and chaos.

The greatest discoveries of the 20th Century physics include Relativity Theory, Quantum Theory and 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. 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. It was a blockbuster bestseller at the time, and it's still well worth reading, a fascinating, enjoyable introduction to one of the most important scientific developments of our time--the birth of chaos theory.I think anyone remotely curious in science and physics, and in particular topics like uncertainty, randomness, nonlinearities, etc. 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! But there are always chances that changes in initial condition might accumulate into something different. Personally I wasn't overly enamoured with the first half of this book - with the possible exception of the piece on Mr Mandelbrot himself - it's very much a historic account of who figured what out rather than shedding light on chaos theory itself. That being said, this felt like a good introduction to the early history of scientists' efforts to understand and explain nonlinear systems and the apparent chaotic behavior observed in natural and man-made systems.

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.Gleick never makes you feel this and takes you through some very difficult concepts with care and assurance. Chaos theory is considered as the third revolution in 20th-century science that uses traditional mathematical ways of understanding and explaining complex natural systems.

It was a finalist for the National Book Award [2] and the Pulitzer Prize [3] in 1987, and was shortlisted for the Science Book Prize in 1989. Various concepts such as the butterfly effect, universal constants, and strange attractors are discussed at a length in the book.Cutting across several scientific disciplines, James Gleick explores and elucidates the science of the unpredicatable with an immensely readable narrative style and flair . Towards the very end you get some very tantalising pictures that make you imagine what you might be able to do with just a bit more scientific detail.