Chaos

Product Information

Psinet to Sell Consumer Internet Division". The New York Times. July 2, 1996 . Retrieved March 23, 2009. If you are into that sort of thing, then this book will be a fun read for you. I found it extremely fascinating. Different systems can behave in the same way, caring not at all for the details of a system's constituent atoms.

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.New beliefs, new definitions. The Second Law, the snowflake puzzle, and loaded dice. Opportunity and necessity. The book is divided as the title describes into three sections - one about the history of information, one about the theory that developed to explain it, and finally a look at the flood of it that we are now experiencing. Throughout is that wonderful sense of excitement, discovery and adventurous thinking that Asimov was so good at relating. In the 1950s, scientists were highly optimistic about the possibilities of predicting – even manipulating – the weather. This hope lay in new computer technology.

Meisel, Martin (Spring 1988). "Review of Chaos: Making a New Science". The Wilson Quarterly. 12 (2): 138–140. ISSN 0363-3276. JSTOR 40257307. Butterfly effect: small change in initial condition can give rise to qualitatively different results. Of course, they knew that it was hard to get perfect measurements on something as complicated as the weather. But they thought that with good enough data and a lot of computer power, it would be possible to calculate the weather for months ahead – at least roughly. 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.” However, apart from all these philosophical implications about life, I really wanted to learn a bit of science behind chaos theory. This is my 2nd attempt at this book almost 2 years later and the book is still uninteresting as it was before. I believe this is one of the most "overrated" books out there. The book is hugely popular, always comes at first when you are looking for recommendations about chaos theory books. So, first time I really had doubts about myself. I thought maybe I am not doing justice to this book. I still had my doubts this time. So, I spent substantial amount of my time behind this book. And I think I have done enough and cannot do anything more for this book.

Science is just one of the ways to understand nature. It is arguably the best way. But even science doesn't have all the answers. It is subjectively elegant and delicate though. There lies an inherent beauty in the simplicity of its systemization. A heady ephemerality that is often missed by those who prostrate at its altar. Worship of science defiles its method and thus destroys in essence what is being worshipped. Babbage, an Englishman, was born a century ahead of his time with his many inventions but his most relevant one to this book was his difference engine. It was a mechanical computing device that thought of numbers as bits. It predates the first vacuum tube computers used in WWII by more than a hundred years. Babbage was very much like Thomas Edison who would come along about forty years later. Babbage was an indefatigable inventor and his mind knew no bounds. For our cousins: .- -- . .-. .. -.-. .- / .... .- ... / ..-. .- .-.. .-.. . -. -.-.-- / .-- . / -.-. .- .-.. .-.. / ..- .--. --- -. / -.-- --- ..- -.-.--

Finally, he ends with a light analysis of the cultural implications of the info-clogged modern world: information fatigue, information glut, and the devaluation of information that is ubiquitously available for the first time in history. When I walk along the streets on a fine day, I see clouds and trees and the boundaries formed by blue skies and mountains. And also, I see buildings. After I read this book, I enjoy walking even more. The images of man-made structures are composed of regular shapes like lines, rectangles, and circles. But the images of nature seem to be fundamentally different. The shapes of nature are irregular and far more diverse, and are also more beautiful. The waves at the sea shore and the sounds of seagull purify and heal my mind. What makes nature so special that man cannot imitate it perfectly? Chaos theory can give an answer for the question. It claims the following: Chaos: Making a new science". Long Range Planning. 22 (5): 152. October 1989. doi: 10.1016/0024-6301(89)90186-6. Have you got that? Fortunately, the book doesn't often get this deep and right after the above quote the author leaves the theory for the flood section - much easier to swallow!Renormalization theory: In particle physics, when we compute equations according to old quantum mechanics, many times we encounter infinity. In nature, every quantity must be finite. So this is absurd. Renormalization is a technique developed from 1940s to 1970s to avoid this problem. After reading the book, I come to know that renormalization is closely related to chaos theory. 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. Actually, keep it simple. Send this: 01000001 01001101 01000101 01010010 01001001 01000011 01000001 00100000 01001000 01000001 01010011 00100000 01000110 01000001 01001100 01001100 01000101 01001110 00100001 00100000 01010111 01000101 00100000 01000011 01000001 01001100 01001100 00100000 01010101 01010000 01001111 01001110 00100000 01011001 01001111 01010101 00100001 Finally, the references are in such bad shape that they warrant comment. None of the main body text has citations of any kind. Multiple times, I looked up authors who were quoted and found no entries in the bibliography! There is a section of "notes", which appears to be a collection of endnotes containing citations and comments, presumably for the many unsourced quotations in the book. This section is puzzling, because the text does not actually refer to any notes. I infer that the numerals which signal there is an endnote pertaining to some point in the text have all been removed from the book, but the notes themselves retained. Presumably the in-text designation of notes was removed to make the text appear readable rather than intimidating. A rigorously sourced book suggests to readers it is meant to be taken seriously; apparently it was decided that that would send the wrong impression for this book. As ever, it is the choice that informs us... Selecting the genuine takes work; then forgetting takes even more work."

An amusing quip on entropy: "Living things manage to remain unstable." Indeed. Increased entropy is the natural progression of the universe. But living things maintain an organized state, which is highly anti-entropic. Hence, we are all unstable people! Lewis, Peter H. (February 11, 1995). "Performance Systems Buys Pipeline Network". The New York Times . Retrieved March 23, 2009. Neat, huh? I'm totally stoked by these bad boys. Of course, we're all, yeah, we use those equations all the time now and it's old hat, but not so long ago, they were totally in left field and none of the big boys wanted to play with them. The early parts of the book are a joy. The stuff about the barbed wire telegraphs is particularly fascinating. As was his explanation of why multistorey buildings needed the telephone to be invented as much as they needed lifts.His next books included two biographies, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, and Isaac Newton, which John Banville said would "surely stand as the definitive study for a very long time to come." [23] Pepinsky, Hal (Spring 1990). "Reproducing Violence: A Review Essay". Social Justice. 17 (1 (39)): 155–172. ISSN 1043-1578. JSTOR 29766530. I have a soft spot for mathematics. The more complicated and obtuse it gets, the more I like it. It is probably best I didn't figure this out earlier in life, because I might have pursued it and gone crazy. So I enjoy reading about it from time to time. I'm sure that for those who are well-versed in information theory, some of his omissions were glaring and seemingly arbitrary, but there is nothing wrong with a book that leaves you wanting more and feeling sufficiently motivated to go out and find it. Helium in a Small Box. “Insolid billowing of the solid.” Flow and form in nature. Albert Libchaber’s delicate triumph. Experiment joins theory. From one dimension to many.