Chaos

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In the 1950s, scientists were highly optimistic about the possibilities of predicting – even manipulating – the weather. This hope lay in new computer technology. Royal Society Prize for Science Books. Shortlisted Entries". Chaos. The Royal Society . Retrieved 3 June 2011. Chaos: Making a new science". Long Range Planning. 22 (5): 152. October 1989. doi: 10.1016/0024-6301(89)90186-6. A discovery about cotton prices. A refugee from Bourbaki. Transmission errors and jagged shores. New dimensions. The monsters of fractal geometry. Quakes in the schizosphere. From clouds to blood vessels. The trash cans of science. “To see the world in a grain of sand.” By the end of the book, we were left with five main ideas about complex systems, and how we might practically apply these to our work in early talent recruitment and development:

It is astonishing that even with so much progress, most of these topics are either not mentioned in mainstream curriculum or not appreciated as those should be.Lewis, Michael (1989). "Review of Chaos: Making a New Science". Human Development. 32 (3/4): 241–244. ISSN 0018-716X. JSTOR 26767401. Butterfly effect: small change in initial condition can give rise to qualitatively different results. If you graph the history of cotton prices for all the years over the 140+ years of record-keeping, and then graph the prices for any period of time–one year, one decade, one week–during that period, the graphs will display the same pattern!" ـ Mandelbrot 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. 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.

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.” I was prepared to hate this book, and it sat on my Kindle for about a year before I finally read it. I am an Electrical Engineer, a group not normally enamored with mathematicians, since Engineering is, almost by definition, the avoidance of pure math.

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In each field, also, the initial work was most often either resisted or ignored. 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. For new doctoral students, there were no mentors in chaos theory, no jobs, no journals devoted to chaos theory. It completely upended ideas about how the natural world worked. It was heady, exciting--and much harder to explain than to demonstrate. Much of what the first generation of chaos scientists did is incredibly easy to demonstrate with a laptop computer today--but most of these chaos pioneers were working with handheld calculators, mainframe computers with dump terminals and limited and unreliable access for something so peripheral to the institution's perceived mission, computers whose only output device was a plotter. I also found it unstructured and confusing. Players show up in one chapter, abruptly disappear in the next, and sometimes reappear years (chapters) later. I never knew what was coming and how it was going to fit in to the whole. Simple and determined (in every detail) systems can behave in an extremely complicated way, apparently random and almost unpredictable. In my little understanding of the science, I suppose the degrees of freedom I could understand here is perhaps a sibling to the topics of uncertainty principle and paradox of observations. 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.

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. For examples, consider a jellyfish and the ink dropping in water. Although one is a living being and the other is not, about shapes, they are quite similar. The lightening paths and the shapes of some trees are also such examples. The universal rules have some features breaking the common sense.

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With the proliferation of social media and smartphones, Gen Z are processing, sharing and acting on information like never before. Employers have to be just as cutting-edge. We’ve experienced first hand the amazing benefits technology can have during graduate recruitment and training. Santa Cruz and the sixties. The analog computer. Was this science? “A long-range vision.” Measuring unpredictability. Information theory. From microscale to macroscale. The dripping faucet. Audiovisual aids. An era ends. 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. National Book Awards - 1987". Chaos: Making a New Science. National Book Foundation . Retrieved 28 May 2011. In other words, even for populations with can be modeled with a simple formula, the math predicts that there will be occasional booms and crashes INDEPENDENT of any external influences. To put it another way, bald eagle populations might crash every once in a while, seemingly at random, whether anyone invents DDT or not- just because of the chaotic nature of how the universe works. (I am not trying to defend DDT, just using it as an example).