Chaos: Making a New Science

Chaos - Making a New Science by James Gleick ISBN-13: 9780670811786 ISBN-10: 0670811785 Publication Date: 10/29/1987 Publisher: Viking Adult Hardcover 6.2 x 9.3 inches, 354 pages Few writers distinguish themselves by their ability to write about complicated, even obscure, topics clearly and engagingly. James Gleick, former science writer for The New York Times, resides in this exclusive category. In Chaos, he takes on the job of depicting the first years of the study of chaos, the seemingly random patterns that characterize many natural phenomena. The focus is as much on scientists studying events as chaos itself. Science readers who have gone through relativity theory, quantum physics, Heisenbergian uncertainty, black holes and the world of quarks and virtual particles only to be stunned by recent Grand Unified Theories (GUTS) will welcome this adventurous attempt to describe the revolutionary science of chaos. "Chaos" is what a handful of theorists steeped in math and computer know-how are calling their challengingly abstract new look at nature in terms of nonlinear dynamics. Gleick traces the ideas of these little-known pioneers, including Mitchell Feigenbaum and his Butterfly Effect; Benoit Mandelbrot, whose "fractal" concept led to a new geometry of nature; and Joseph Ford who countered Einstein with "God plays dice with the universe. But they're loaded dice". Chaos is deep, even frightening in its holistic embrace of nature as paradoxically complex, wildly disorderly, random and yet stable in its infinite stream of "self-similarities". "Chaos-theory, touted as the third revolution in 20th-century science after relativity and quantum mechanics, uses traditional mathematics to understand complex natural systems with too many variables to study. Philosophically, it counters the Second Law of Thermodynamics by demonstrating the "spontaneous emergence of self-organization." In this new science apparent disorder is meaningful; the structure of chaos can be mapped by plotting graphically the calculations of nonlinear mathematics using "fractal" geometry, a brainchild of Benoit Mandelbrot in which symmetrical patterns repeat across different scales."-Library Journal..