Book Description
In this book Gary William Flake develops in depth the simple idea that recurrent rules can produce rich and complicated behaviors. Distinguishing "agents" (e.g., molecules, cells, animals, and species) from their interactions (e.g., chemical reactions, immune system responses, sexual reproduction, and evolution), Flake argues that it is the computational properties of interactions that account for much of what we think of as "beautiful" and "interesting." From this basic thesis, Flake explores what he considers to be today's four most interesting computational topics: fractals, chaos, complex systems, and adaptation.
Each of the book's parts can be read independently, enabling even the casual reader to understand and work with the basic equations and programs. Yet the parts are bound together by the theme of the computer as a laboratory and a metaphor for understanding the universe. The inspired reader will experiment further with the ideas presented to create fractal landscapes, chaotic systems, artificial life forms, genetic algorithms, and artificial neural networks.
Customer Reviews:
Great book.......2007-08-13
This is an excellent book. I've been reading it for weeks. The chapters are not long, but the content is amazing. The author combines explanations and equations in a format that is demonstrative and repeatible. This is a very good book to study yielding the understanding necessary to penetrate many other advanced books on complexity theory. The author starts by examining whole numbers and real number problems. Next, he examine Godel's incomplete theory of predicate logic showing that no formal language is complete. Next, he examines fractals, self-similar patterns, low ordered with high compression and high order with low order compression, L-systems, and Juliet and Mandel-brot fractals. Fractals open up an emmense study into the complex pattern from simple rules and recursion. Next, he examines equations of strange attraction, chaos, and demonstrates stability behavior within complexity. Next, he looks at small universes created by running CA. NNs and GAs are examined in the last chapter. I was excited to write down many of the authors processes and run them using OpenGL and C. I believe this book to be an excellent book for college students. The material is easy to understand and the content very demonstratible. Cause and effect are very cohesive in this book. Even though the book seems simple, it covers an vast amount of topics necessary to understanding AI and AL.
Good first book on the subject of simulating natural phenomena.......2006-08-04
This is a good introductory textbook for college undergraduate mathematics and computer science students that attempts to combine the theory of computation with some mathematical concepts and in the end, manages to model virtual life by explaining basic concepts in chaos, adaptation, fractals, and complex systems. There are better books on all of these subjects, but few others do such a good job of tying together key concepts from each discipline into the one theme of this book. However, there is only enough room to outline the included subjects rather than investigate them thoroughly.
Also, the mathematics is elementary enough to be accessible to a mathematically mature high school student. The mathematics is concisely explained as it is needed, with just a page or two for each of calculus, linear algebra, affine transformations, complex numbers, vector calculus, and matrix algebra. Thus, the included mathematics makes a better refresher than a tutorial for the novice even though the author states in the preface that he wrote this book for a younger version of himself. This book teaches its subject matter mainly by demonstrating concepts through simulations that are expressed in dozens of programs which illustrate the points being made. Instructions on using the programs are scattered throughout the book. The source code is available for download on the web, along with selected excerpts from the book.
I would recommend this as a first book for those interested in simulating natural concepts, but it should not be your last if your goal is to truly grasp the concepts presented and produce simulations of your own. However, an even better book on this subject is "Mathematical Models in Biology", although it is an advanced text. A very accessible book that is also more advanced than this text is "Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos: With Applications to Physics, Biology, Chemistry and Engineering". It clearly explains the mathematics while tying it into key concepts in nature. "Chaos and Fractals" by Peitgen is a good book on the subject for the layperson with a fascination for mathematics presented in some depth. The book also has various Java programs that illustrate key concepts.
Interesting Topics.......2002-03-27
Good book, [X] bucks is a bargain, it's worth twice that easily.
Favorite things about this book
Covers L-systems and also gives the rules for how to make some interesting plants. Also this book touches on some aspects of AI like game-trees and neural nets. The author discuses "boids" and self-organization with autonomous agents that act together, and shows simulations of ants and a flock of birds using this concept.
Real "How Nature Works". Already is "Legend in the Making.".......2001-09-24
I recently became interested a lot in Nature. Especially, being someone in the field of Computer Science, the computational aspect. And this book is by far one of my favourite among all the "How Nature Works" kind of books I've read.
This Computational Beauty of Nature (CBofN) covered a lot of topics. Ranged from brief introduction to Computation Theory, Fractals, Chaos, Complexity, Adaptation. (See the Table of Content for more details).
All topics are written in surprisingly clear and very understandable manner. With as little Math as possible. (From my opinion, these topics cannot be completely understood without Mathematics -- The Language of Nature). Therefore, it is also accessible to layperson.
This book does not, however, go so deep into each subject. (You won't expect it to do that with its less-than 500 pages, don't you? :-) Instead, it does give nice backgrounds, fundamental knowledge, and important ideas for each. So, if you are interesting in any of the subjects presented here, you can go on to the more specialized books on your own.
One of the nicest feature of this book, which can hardly be found in other text, is that the it does show how things work together, where and why. For example, natural phenomena like adaptation, evolution, computation, and some other things else related to each other. How can one view this from that perspective, and vice versa. etc.
One other nice feature of this book is, you can really play with almost all concepts using a number of computer programs. All the programs are downloadable (with source code, under GNU license) from the book's homepage. So, you can reproduce almost all the figures from the book.
However, for one thing, the homepage address given in the book, in the edition/printing I have is incorrect. Maybe MIT Press had changed the structure of their website or something...
...you can still search for it using your favourite web-search engine.
About the website, all the good things are there as well, including errata. (Of course, Perfect things are very rare in Nature... So, books with some errors are ok. The thing that matter is the authors know it/admit it and tell the readers or not).
Conclusion: If you want to understand "How Nature Works" from the computational point of view. If you interested in Chaos theory, Fractals and Complexity. Then, make no mistake, you can't go wrong with this one. (And, get the hardcover edition, because you will read it, read it, read it again, and keep refering to it. So the paperback edition probably can't endure that :-)
I want to give it more stars if I only could. This book will always get the highest rating possible from me wherever and whenever I review it.
Nature herself is so beautiful. So, it's time to get to know her, to learn about her and to understand her! And this book just did it, in such a way that can hardly be better!
Buy this book and get hooked...........2001-04-11
Great book - will get you hooked to this science. Intuition given more weightage than equations and the result is something a broad range of people can use. Whether you're the curious novice who's dabbling in chaos to see what it is all about or you're the mathematician teaching this stuff, you'd love to have this book on your table. Happy reading :)
Book Description
he tendency to synchronize may be the most mysterious and pervasive drive in all of nature. It has intrigued some of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, including Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman, Norbert Wiener, Brian Josephson, and Arthur Winfree. At once elegant and riveting, Sync tells the story of the dawn of a new science. Steven Strogatz, a leading mathematician in the fields of chaos and complexity theory, explains how enormous systems can synchronize themselves, from the electrons in a superconductor to the pacemaker cells in our hearts. He shows that although these phenomena might seem unrelated on the surface, at a deeper level there is a connection, forged by the unifying power of mathematics.
Customer Reviews:
Heavy Science for Light Readers.......2007-09-15
What a fun book. Strogatz has managed to talk about the leading edge of mathematical modeling without a single equation! He uses a comfortable prose and never strays too far from the story of his research. The reader is treated to a view of the way that the world network of scientists organizes itself within areas of research and finds unions where research from one speciality can contribute to another. Who would have thought that the western power grid, the Internet Movie Database and the nervous system of a worm called C. elegans could be effectively modeled with the same operational principles.
sync sync .......2007-03-14
This book gave both nature and theoretical explanation of what sync is and how it might
happen. Of course, its raminifaction still need a lot of exploration. This book is a good start and definite a good read for scientific inquiring mind. Read it and you know if you sync with this book.
Sync: The pulse of creation.......2007-03-06
In his 1987 book Chaos, James Gleick noted that choatic systems produce periodic patches of order.
At that time and during that state of research, the answer to the question of why this should be so remained largely unresolved. And to be honest, after reading this book and learning about the sync or synchronicity of how fireflies light up the night in unison and how inanimate pendulums can come to swing in unison the question will be still be largely unresolved.
However, you will leave this book with some additional interesting food for thought.
Why do periodic patches of order emerge in choatic systems?
Well, one answer suggested seems to be that if that chaotic system produces periodic amounts of a like particle -- like an electron -- that those like particles can generally be relied upon to behave similarly. Then maybe it's the delicate calculus of these mutually constitued similar behaviors that helps give rise to the rise of order.
But maybe not...and such is the state of research into this important issue.
Just Fun Useful Knowledge.......2007-01-17
If you have any interest in science or how things work, then this book promises to be an interesting read.
Strogatz discusses such cool topics like Fireflies, clapping your hands, sleep cycles, and related history.
Once you read this book, you will instantly appreciate how many random things have order, and I guarantee that at some point in conversation you will bring up a point from this book - I do, often.
Not quite synched.......2007-01-12
An interesting book, but rather unfocused and not particularly convincing-- I think he tries too hard to see synch everywhere.
Book Description
Fractals are unique patterns left behind by the unpredictable movements -- the chaos -- of the world at work. The branching patterns of trees, the veins in a hand, water twisting out of a running tap -- all of these are fractals. Learn to recognize them and you will never again see things in quite the same way.
Fractals permeate our lives, appearing in places as tiny as the surface of a virus and as majestic as the Grand Canyon. From ancient tribal peoples to modern painters to the animators of Star Wars, artists have been captivated by fractals and have utilized them in their work. Computer buffs are wild about fractals as well, for they can be generated on ordinary home computers.
In Fractals: The Patterns of Chaos, science writer John Briggs uses over 170 illustrations to clearly explain the significance -- and more importantly, the beauty -- of fractals. He describes how fractals were discovered, how they are formed, and the unique properties different fractals share. Fractals is a breathtaking guided tour of a brand new aesthetic of art, science, and nature. It will revolutionize the way you see the world and your place within it.
* Contains a special bibliography listing fractal generating software for desktop computers
Customer Reviews:
Patterns to Inspire - A Captivating Look into Fractals.......2004-10-31
This book brings a comprehensive and visually intriguing approach to the study of fractal geometry and the chaos theory. Through thought provoking imagery and discernible explanations & comparisons, John Briggs has sparked my curiosity where I now look more closely at the world around me. I believe this book is intended to captivate those with the ability to visualize and appreciate the aesthetics and interconnectedness of the arts, sciences and the natural phenomena that surrounds us. An insightful & visually stimulating read!
Don't buy this book.......2004-06-11
This book says absolutely nothing. It has a few good pictures (the best one is one the cover by the way), but the text is utterly worthless and uninformative. My favorite quote from the book is "Nonlinear means not linear." Really? Don't waste your money. Now I understand why I found it at the used bookstore.
Great Photos, Poor Content.......2003-03-02
This is a fantastic source of images on the subject of fractals, but not a great source of learning. Most books on math and science are difficult for the general reader; few authors (like Isaac Asimov) can make complex things easily understood. But the author of this book is, in my opinion, doing the public a disservice by oversimplifying the subject. The explanations underestimate the public's ability to think, and even include a number of things which are either dead wrong or made-up! The subject of fractals is still new, and there are recently more books available to explain fractals to the general public. Again, this is a great source of images, if that's what you're looking for, but look for another source if you want to undersatnd and appreciate this incredible and important topic.
OK.......2003-01-25
This book was OK---but it had more fractals in nature and not so much in the way of computer-generated fractal art which is what I was looking for. Not bad if you can find it used.
What an incredibly book!!.......2002-05-18
This book is more art than science. It has an incredibly wealth of pictures. It gives you a good visual introduction to factals. A great coffee table book!
Book Description
Surfing the Edge of Chaos is a brilliant, powerful, and practical book about the parallels between business and nature—two fields that feature nonstop battles between the forces of tradition and the forces of transformation. It offers a bold new way of thinking about and responding to the personal and strategic challenges everyone in business faces these days.
Download Description
Every few years a book changes the way people think about a field. In psychology there is Daniel Goleman's Emotional Intelligence. In science, James Gleick's Chaos. In economics and finance, Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street. And in business there is now Surfing the Edge of Chaos by Richard T. Pascale, Mark Millemann, and Linda Gioja. Surfing the Edge of Chaos is a brilliant, powerful, and practical book about the parallels between business and nature -- two fields that feature nonstop battles between the forces of tradition and the forces of transformation. It offers a bold new way of thinking about and responding to the personal and strategic challenges everyone in business faces these days.
Customer Reviews:
Biology is destiny for companies, too.......2007-03-30
Managers should closely watch new discoveries in biology, especially the study of self-organization and emergence, particularly as the old hierarchical model of corporate organization becomes seemingly obsolete. Richard T. Pascale, Mark Millemann and Linda Gioja present case histories showing how corporate leaders executed turnarounds and solved critical problems by tapping the insight and intelligence of their organizations' members. In many cases, however, their success was only partial. It is to the authors' credit that they do not flinch from describing failures, even as they support the approach. They particularly note that stress can have the positive effect of forcing an organization to change its behavior. Though they first published their observations in 2000, some of their insights seem likely to endure the test of time. We recommend this book in confidence that executives can learn from its concepts about how natural systems can inform management.
Shoddy science research.......2003-10-01
"Businesses...can learn a great deal from nature (p 3)". I wholeheartedly agree, but unfortunately this book does not deliver.
The business research appears well done, but the science reserach that is supposedly it backing up is abysmal. The impression this book has left me is that the writers started with their theories and then handpicked some scientific anecdotes and (sometimes erroneous) generalities to support some of their claims, while other claims (like the Law of Requisite Variety) have no substantiation from the life sciences attempted. This is a backwards approach; I would have liked to see the authors examine the scientific research and then see what the business implications are.
Three examples of erroneous generalities:
1. Endemic island organisms just "tweaking the status quo" (in reality, this is where the greatest diversity happens; its the 'weedy' organisms like starlings and dandelions that adapt by just 'tweaking'). (And I will try to ignore the goof about the dodo being from the South Pacific).
2. The idea that cooperation and altruism are major forces that organisms "seek" (in reality, these have been discovered to be incidental effects).
3. Equating the idea that 'every molecule in the human body replaces itself via genetic instructions' with the idea that 'human and corporate bodies are rejuvenated by fresh and varied genetic material'. Those are two very opposed statements.
There is so much biological research that has major implications for organizational research that is lacking here: Memetics and primate social systems are two in particular.
To conclude: The authors apparently have a poor grasp of the biological sciences, so that means their attempts at backing up their claims with biological reserach is suspect at best.
Read this or be left in the dust!.......2002-04-09
Its funny. I was reading the review following this one and the person was saying how he could NOT find anything worthwhile to apply to his business. He must not have even picked up the book!
I think there are plenty of great lessons within the book. Its not only a book about strategy, but a new framework to think in terms of. The world has changed greatly in the last 20 years and a lot of the old management frameworks have less significance. Complexity science is the new way to think and this book does a fantastic job of relating the "complex" topic to business. And the rules apply to all areas of the organization: strategy, organizational design, etc. If you want to be prepared to lead the complex globlal organizations of tomorrow, then this is a must read.
Can't see the use.......2002-02-21
I read this kind of books hoping to find useful ideas for my business. Here I can't find any.
Even if one is just curious, the book is too full of platitudes. For instance, the Army chapter (in which I was genuinely interested) waxes high on gruelling experience, after-action review, and all that. But what's the big deal? Mutatis mutandis, I did the same in sports training twenty years ago.
PS: I think I got unhelpful votes from people disliking my Army comments, so I edited this review to better reflect what I mean. But let me make it clear: independent of any view of the military, this is a bad book.
A Must Read.......2001-03-01
Surfing the Edge of Chaos does a marvelous job of taking many of the ideas being developed in complexity theory and applying them to the business world. In contrast say to Garrett Ralls who tried to do much the same thing, this book succeeds. I found myself continually thinking about not only the examples they provide, but also on my own work experiences and other companies that I have analyzed.
The authors do an excellent job of contrasting their approach (adaptive leadership) with more traditional reorganization (operational leadership). But refreshingly, they also acknowledge that in some cases, the more traditional approach might be more appropriate. There are many interesting concepts being developed by complexity theorists and this book manages to capture many, if not most, of them.
They show repeatedly the need to increase the stress on an organization in order to break past patterns of behavior. Their use of fitness landscapes (the idea that a successful company rests on a peak, and that in order to reach a new higher peak, often you must go down into the valley) is very powerful and at least partially explains why so many successful companies subsequently struggle, or fail, to adapt. Importantly though, the authors also spend a great deal of time talking about the unintended (or second and third order) effects of change. The point is not that you will be able to predict all of them (which is what chaos theory explicity says you cannot do), but rather that you must be flexible enough to roll with those unanticipated consequences.
Does that mean that every idea in this book is new? Of course not, but to be successful, a new theory often must combine the old with the new. And this book does a masterful of applying the ideas of Chaos/Complexity theory to business, of providing a new framework to think about both old and new problems. You may not agree with everything that appears in this book, but you will certainly come away with much food for thought.
Average customer rating:
- A thorough study of the history of quantum physics and an exhaustive description of how order emerges from chaos
- A classic on self-organization
- Dissipative structures what? Chaos
- A popularization of chaos and its philosophical implications
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Order Out of Chaos
Ilya Prigogine
Manufacturer: Bantam
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ASIN: 0553343637
Release Date: 1984-03-01 |
Customer Reviews:
A thorough study of the history of quantum physics and an exhaustive description of how order emerges from chaos .......2006-12-01
Prigogine describes his ideas of how order emerged from a ground of chaos and how the processes of entropy can lead a system open to its environment to evolve greater complexity. He also gives an exposition of the relevance of science to society. Prigogine's Nobel prize-winning models of dissipative structures are difficult to understand but persistent effort will reward the reader. His theories are as applicable to the evolution and expansion of consciousness as to the emergence of life on earth from a relatively simple environment.
A classic on self-organization.......2004-05-09
This work is one of the classics of the breakthrough period of chaos theory, complex systems, and self-organization theories. Mixing two modes and two cultures it stretches its bow between the nitty-gritty details of dissipative systems, and the history of the relations of the human and natural sciences, from the age of the emergence of thermodynamics to the present. The book has something now routinely filtered from discussion, the early critiques of the Newtonian mindset as it was starting to become dominant. The material on the history of the two cultures would seem to fall on deaf ears these days, and gives the book at depth not often seen in works of this type. Very much worth reading.
Dissipative structures what? Chaos.......1997-11-20
The whole problem with writing about a book, and especially this one, is that one has to cut a long story short. A story long enough to encompass a fair amount of scientific history - elaborated, if not referenced exhaustively. Not that it is meant to be. Prigogine's journey does not offer to take you by the hand for a guided tour of order, complexity and self-organisation. Rather, it keeps to the spirit of Toffler's introduction, (Was it coincidental that it was the other way round?!) where he talks about the wonderful art of scientific dissection. Order out of chaos, however, is a difficult read for the anyone who has been initiated into the scientific non-fiction. For those who expect the book to be a popular account of concepts in complexity and self-organisation, the intense style and the depth of detail can be exhausting. Like Penrose in the Emperor's New Mind, Prigogine's style is uncompromising. Toffler's introduction is fitting, if only in parts. The book does not offer explanations. Rather, Prigogine prefers to illumate his readers with his keen philosophical bent. It is here that the book triumphs. The effort that has gone into integrating the ideas in the book, the subtle nuances reflecting Prigogine's own views is truly commendable. But then, one should be fairly conversant with the loopholes that science finds itself in. The description of the behaviour of complex systems warrants some mention. The idea of switching between reality and mathematical description does not gel with the rest of the narrative in parts - specially when chemistry is the running example. Well, Prigogine wasn't writing the book with the intention of it being self-contained - and he makes no bones about it. That is the seed of inspiration, I suppose, for any writer, be it for the cause of science or for the sheer love for the written word. Prigogine has shown that philosophy is in some way inseparable from what many consider the scientist's playground. And we are glad that he has shared his views with us.
A popularization of chaos and its philosophical implications.......1996-12-24
Prigogine argues persuasively that he has reconciled classical
dynamics with the human conviction that the future cannot be
predicted from a knowledge of initial conditions and differential equations alone.
He draws the reader through his own intellectual odyssey from
classical thermodynamics, through linear nonequilibrium thermodynamics, and finally
to his holy grail of nonlinear nonequilibrium thermodynamics. I suspect he has
identified the quantitative tools that will connect the Human Genome Project to a functional
understanding of cell biology and physiology. Tools capable of dealing with complexity.
If you are a scientist who has followed these disciplines from afar, and who has
wished for a succinct summary that does not shrink from rigor, then acquire this book.
You will chuckle at the constant barbs directed across the English Channel, and you will
learn wonderful things about thermodynamics and thermokinetics.
So few scientific books reveal the authors' insights. Instead, they teem with facts and formulas.
Prigogine and Stengers have bedded physics with philosophy as if they were matchmakers for
an illicit tryst. You will find yourself whispering, "Aha!"
And you will, as I have, wear out your pen with underlining.
I loved Carl Sagan's "Demon Haunted World", but Sagan was speaking to everyman.
Prigogine and Stengers are speaking to scientists in fields outside their own.
They believe they have seen the light, and they want you to see it too. Give them the chance to convince you.
You will not be disappointed.
Book Description
The open ocean--that vast expanse of international waters--spreads across three-fourths of the globe. It is a place of storms and danger, both natural and manmade. And at a time when every last patch of land is claimed by one government or another, it is a place that remains radically free.
With typically understated lyricism, William Langewiesche explores this ocean world and the enterprises--licit and illicit--that flourish in the privacy afforded by its horizons. But its efficiencies are accompanied by global problems--shipwrecks and pollution, the hard lives and deaths of the crews of the gargantuan ships, and the growth of two pathogens: a modern and sophisticated strain of piracy and its close cousin, the maritime form of the new stateless terrorism.
This is the outlaw sea that Langewiesche brings startlingly into view. The ocean is our world, he reminds us, and it is wild.
Customer Reviews:
A stunningly good read.......2007-06-15
I could not put this book down. Some other reviewers' complaints (too many digressions, no central theme) are precisely what I like about it. Great stuff!
Best of all, Langewiesche is a great writer. It was a joy to read poetic sentences that were not poetic for their own sake. Langewiesche is a good writer who does not write good sentences merely to dazzle but to actually tell us something.
If this book is any indication, I'm ordering all of his others and look forward to reading them.
actually a little boring.......2007-05-03
Considering that the subject matter of this book is shipwrecks, smuggling, castaways, piracy, and a host of other lurid ocean-related themes, I was surprised to find it on the tedious side.
Langewiesche's basic strategy is to discuss shipwreck after shipwreck, and then investigate the seamy underworld of the shipping companies lurking behind the disasters, and the laws that have helped to engender the situation.
But the book is poorly organized and Langewiesche gets distracted easily: for example, after going on and on about the wreck of the Estonia, he continues for a couple of dozen pages about the various conspiracy theories surrounding its sinking. Digressions like this are common.
The book also has no logical beginning or ending, and I can't see why Langewiesche even divides the work into chapters. A glimpse at the titles of the chapters (e.g., "To the Ramparts," "On a Captive Sea," "The Ocean's Way") is enough to suggest that there is no progression of thought being realized in the book, and other than a general lament on the rough and shady nature of international shipping, the book ends up having little to offer.
Certainly not in the way of entertainment!
An interesting overview.......2007-04-24
As other have noted, it is a little disjointed as it is a compilation of some previously published material. However, as someone with little knowledge about how the economics of ocean transport works, I found it insightful, infuriating and interesting.
The blurbs on the cover make you think it is about "corporate malfeasance" and while the author does seem to want more control over the oceans, it is a bit more nuanced than that. He does recognize the impossibility of regulating such a vast expanse. Even on the environmental issue of how to control the business of scrapping ships (which is done these days on heavily polluted beaches in India) he is not willing to make the scrappers the villains. Rather, he notes that while the work is dangerous and not environmentally friendly, to simply outlaw the practice would increase insurance fraud and put a large number of poor people out of work.
Langewiesche does not provide much in the way of answers, but the book is a good place perhaps to start the conversation.
Lacks a unifying theme.......2007-01-23
This book is a compilation of previously published materials that lack a unifying theme. Although the information presented is interesting, the author fails to tie together the topics into a meaningful whole. In the end, he reaches no conclusions. Worth reading from the library, but I wouldn't buy the book again.
Fascinating .......2006-08-17
This book unveils the fascinating world of the sea. Written in a suspenseful style, William Langewiesche, carefully constructs his plot that the sea remains untamed and uncontrolled. I borrowed the audio version of this book from a local library really enjoyed hearing the author recount stories of bravery, treachery, and catastrophe. Especially interesting to me was the story of the Estonia, the major ferry that tragically sunk in less than 20 killing almost 700 people. I recommend this to those who enjoy non-fiction, investigative reporting.
Book Description
Eliot Porters photos of the natural world, spanning thirty-five years and five continentsfrom an Antarctic ice floe to a North American desert to an Icelandic lava fieldreveal in mesmerizing ways what scientists are beginning to see for themselves: the patterns, relations, and inter-actions present in natures disorder and wildness.
Customer Reviews:
Beautiful and Profound.......2002-08-26
If a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to listen...does it make a sound? Is there any sense, order or meaning to the universe beyond our human projections?
These photographs of Eliot Porter--selected to provide an illustration and counterpoint to James Gleick's eloquent text--are among the most rapturously beautiful ever produced. They are the visual equivalent of poet Wallace Stevens' attempt to grasp that which lies beyond the limits of sentience. Looking through the original hardcover edition is both an act of meditation and of homage--to the greatness of creation, in all its mystery, as well as to the human need to think, feel, and reach for meaning. As I journey through these images, I ask myself, do we look out upon the universe from afar--or do we do so from within, as integral parts of the greater mystery? Let go...allow Gleick's text to pose the question--and Porter's photographs to frame the answer.
Great content, poor printing.......2001-10-31
I received my copy of the new (2001) printing of NATURE'S CHAOS earlier today. While the Porter photographs are both unusual and beautiful, it's great pity that this edition is poorly printed. I've not seen the original edition for comparison. In this printing, color is poorly balanced for many photographs, often to the point that the original vision is obscured. Plus, some photos are very "soft" and lacking in detail, which is surely the fault of the printers as well. What a shame, and what a surprise coming from Little, Brown.
A beautiful work that captures the natural essence of chaos.......1998-06-04
As a graduate student, there is little time or mental space for pursuits beyond the academe-especially one that does not operate in the verbal realm. At nights, on weekends, and in reveries induced by deoxygenated library atmospheres I am a photographer. An early inspiration for me was Eliot Porter. Very early on I became enthralled by the careful studies of trees and fields. I was drawn to the intense, microscopic details in his works, which could not be characterized as minute in any regard. I was amazed at how, by capturing a dizzying array of detail in his work, he could portray the raw, intricate, complex beauty of something I had stared upon, vacuously, every day. Later, when I first became interested in chaos theory, dynamic systems and complexity, I enjoyed a new appreciation of Porter's craft. I found that in the visual sense I was always looking to portray the orderly chaos, or the chaotic beauty of nature. Once, whilst in the office of a professor that I am writing book with (about cognition-emotion interaction as a self-organizing system) I came across the book "Nature's Chaos" by Porter. I immediately recognized the photography and picked the book up from the shelf. To my amazement, Gleick, whose book "Chaos" started a revolution of sorts in the biological science community, was a co-author. I was enraptured. I borrowed it. I tried to buy it from my colleague. I wandered through used book stores on my way to the campus. I made inquiries at the publisher.
Nihil.
So I ordered it through Amazon.com. It arrived, ahead of schedule. I justified the price to myself because I had won a small award for a photograph that was inspired by Porter.
The book is astounding. The text is lyrical and erudite, it flows and meshes with the startling images. I can't say much more-but if you are a photographer, or chaos buff, or god-help you both, then this is a requisite volume. Don't hesitate. Ta panta re!
Jason Ramsay
Customer Reviews:
CHEMICAL CHAOS!.......2002-01-18
My dad first found these in England. He thought I might like them so he got a few for me. I really LOVED reading them in grade and learning stuff. Now, in sixth grade, we are learning the things that I already knew! I showed it to my science teacher and I still haven't gotten it back because she's loaned to so many people! She would read exerpts from it every morning, AND I passed the class with an A+! It's a great book and Nick Arnold is such a good writer, you don't even know how much you're learning. :-)
Delightful chemistry!.......1999-04-16
Chemical Chaos presents a delightful history of scientific development while teaching basic chemistry. Information is presented in cartoon-style which is readable by ages 10 and up. The experiments are not extensive but are well-thought out to demonstrate scientific principles. And the experiments are easy, use readily-available materials, include safe practices, and apply to everyday life.
Nick Arnold does it again, and makes it fun to learn........1998-09-05
I have it on good authority that Nick Arnold is no chemist! But reading his excellent children's book 'Chemical Chaos' you'd never know it. He demonstrates remarkable knowledge and research ability, and this book is sure to keep children amused across the world. The whole 'Horrible Science' series is wonderful, and makes learning a pleasure for everyone, young and old alike.
Reason, Steven Postrel
. . . In print, at least, what might seem arrogant comes across as a kind of innocent, childlike enthusiasm, a lack of concern for anything but the sheer joy of figuring things out. His ruthless simplifications of geology, evolution, and neurology pay off because, as Bak notes, his models describe behavior that is common across these domains. This universality means that trampling across others' turf is not only acceptable, but almost mandatory, if the underlying principles are to be exposed. Finally, for the most part, Bak wants the reader to grasp the basic logic of his arguments; only rarely does he try to persuade with flights of poetic language or brute intellectual authority.
Book Description
This is a science book, intended for the general reader who is interested in science. The author is a physicist who is well-known for his development of the property called "self-organized Criticality", a property or phenomenon that lies at the heart of large dynamical systems. It can be used to analyse systems that are complicated, and which are part of the new science of complexity. It is a unifying concept that can be used to study phenomena in fields as diverse as economics, astronomy, the earth sciences, and physics. The author discusses his discovery of self-organized criticality; its relation to the world of classical physics; computer simulations and experiments which aid scientist's understanding of the property; and the relation of the subject to popular areas such as fractal geometry and power laws; cellular automata, and a wide range of practical applications. The book is readable without a science background--below the level of Scientific American.
Customer Reviews:
Intuitive & makes you think of universal laws.......2005-02-09
This book is a great attempt at finding some universality based on systems in a "critical" state, with departures from such state taking place in a manner that follows power laws. The sandpile is a great baby model for that.
Some people are critical of Bak's approach, some even suggesting that we may not get power laws in these "sandpile" effects, but something less scalable in the tails. The point is :so what? The man has vision.
I looked at the reviews of this book. Clearly a few narrow-minded scientists do not seem to like it (many did not like Per Bak's ego). But the book is remarkably intuitive and the presentation is so clear that he takes you by the hand. It is even entertaining. If you are looking to find flaws in his argument his pedagogy allows it (it is immediately obvious to us who dabble with simulations of these processes that you need an infinite sandpile to get a pure power law).
Another problem. I have been ordering the book on Amazon for ages. Copernicus books does not respond to emails. I got my copy at the NYU library. Bak passed away 2 years ago and nobody seems to be pushing for his interest and that of us his readers (for used books to sell for 99 implies some demand). This convinces me NEVER to publish with Springer.
a good book from a great scientist.......2005-01-24
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding how Nature works. Nature by far is bursty, intermittent, diverse, highly inhomogeneous both in time and space. This ubiquitous non-uniformity includes natural shapes, human behavior, dynamics of macroevolution, economics, distribution of galaxies, etc. In contrast, we all are very familiar with "bell curves", describing the statistics of the homogeneous-ordered-normal-boring. No theory can account properly with the prevalence in Nature of in-homogeneity and diversity. This book it is dedicated to propose a physical mechanism to generate all of that at once!. Starting with the 1987 Per Bak work on toy models, the book conveys the idea that there is hope in finding a few (instead of one for each phenomena) common ("universal") mechanisms from which the diversity (complexity?) seen in Nature emerges out of the interaction of the parts.
The theme of the book is: how to write the equation that generates complexity, and -importantly- without including complexity in the recipe. I usually recommend this book (long with Buchanan's "Ubiquity") to novice students eager to read the first things about this question, and the majority found my suggestion useful. The book contains a detailed bibliography helping the newcomer to check further the breadth and validity of the author' claims. The reader could disagree with some bold claims, but should be assured that there is not frivolous thinking wasting pages: all the material in the book was published in the most prestigious scientific journals and quoted by thousands of scientists who found inspiration in this perspective. That alone, set this book apart from recent ones claiming to have a theory for everything.
great book...dont be fooled!!!.......2004-03-30
great book. don't buy an old used copy here for $99 when they say it's "hard to find". you can buy a brand new copy direct from the publisher - www.copernicusbooks.com - for only $18!!!
Pretentious, but hollow inside.......2003-03-12
Per Bak claimed to have invented a fundamentally new way of looking at nature by ascribing an almost mystical significance to ``power-law'' distributions (for the non-technical reader, that simply means one quantity is proportional to another quantity raised to some power; the power, typically a number like 1.8, is a constant). There are two things wrong with this claim:
1. There is no deep significance to a power law distribution. All it means is that there is no natural scale of the phenomenon. (No power law runs from zero to infinity, so at best it means that there is no natural scale in the range in which the distribution is a power law.)
2. There is nothing new about this conclusion. It was understood in the 1940's by Kolmogorov in his theory of turbulence and Fermi in his theory of cosmic ray acceleration. The only thing Bak added was the application of these old ideas to the artificial and uninteresting problem of sandpiles.
There is nothing wrong with taking old ideas and applying them to new problems. However, Bak never admitted where the ideas came from. He never cited this earlier work. For example, models identical to his ``Self Organized Criticality'' were published by scientists working on earthquakes (Journal of Geophysical Research 90, 1894 [1985] and 91, 10412 [1986], building on earlier ideas by Knopoff). Although Bak was aware of this work, published before he ever began working on ``SOC'', he didn't acknowledge it. To a scientist this is an unpardonable sin, equivalent to a banker cooking the books.
There is a striking resemblence between Bak's How Nature Works and Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. Each author claimed to have made profound and original insights which explain not just one phenomenon, but almost every aspect of the world around us. In each case these supposed insights are essentially mathematical, based on models which ignore the actual physical, chemical or biological processes involved. And in each case closer examination shows that the work is almost trivial, and irrelevant to real scientific problems. You get out what you put in, and when you don't put any science in you, don't get any science out.
Each of these authors has also claimed credit to which he is not entitled by failing to acknowledge the prior work of others. They suffer from a would-be-genius syndrome, in which someone is so infatuated with his own supposed brilliance that he both exaggerates the slight significance of his work and fails to give credit to those who actually did it earlier....
Applied Self Organized Critically.......2001-12-17
Per Bak's book How Nature Works is about the theory of self organizing criticality and its applicability to a variety of questions and problems in several sciences. It is an interesting and quick read for the most part. I have read other books on self organized criticality that were far less understandable and more limited in their scope of applicability.
Although there were portions of Bak's work that were a little belabored-I found my interest in sand piles began to sag after the initial discussion, for instance-much of the rest of the book was enlightening. The discussion in Chapter 1 of the contrast between the clarity and simplicity of the laws of physics and the complexity and unpredictability of nature was particularly interesting as was the discussion of the difference between chaos and complexity. His explanation in Chapter 2 of the theory of self organized criticality and the history of its development is far clearer than I found Stuart Kauffman's to be. It might make a better starting place for anyone wishing to understand the theory a little better before going on to Kauffman's and other books on the subject.
Essentially the theme of the book involves the self organization of much of the universe, from stars and volcanoes to traffic jams and economics, into critical states sustained as stable systems until they evolve through cascade events or what Bak calls avalanches (after his sand pile paradigm) or catastrophes. Bak explains that the system maintains itself along a critical line, above which chaos rules and nothing can be predicted and below which nothing happens so there is nothing to predict!
Chapter 5 which deals with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions interested me in particular because of my own study of geology. Here Bak suggests that geophysicists' attempts at prediction of events is a lost cause. He believes it to be based upon the mistaken human habit of looking at random events for patterns and periodicity where none exists. While the history of a given event can be studied in some detail after the fact, the information derived is useless in predicting the future. In Bak's opinion, the variables involved are so legion and are interrelated in so convoluted a way as to be impossible to monitor before the fact.
In chapters 7, 8, and 9 the author attempts to model Darwin's gradual evolution, Gould's punctuated equilibrium, and the Santa Fe Institute's fitness landscape to see which fits the facts better. In general Darwin's theories are vindicated---no real surprise there---while punctuated equilibrium is also found to have it's place in a complete theory of evolution. Chapter 11 contained a section on the unavoidability of catastrophes and fluctuations---and by their extension, one supposes, biological evolution-which casts light on the boom and bust character of economics among other things. This chapter extends the use of the theory of SOC to human activities as well as to human evolution.
The author's style is very chatty, which makes it readable and personable. By filling in the human details of the discoverers, he makes the book more personal. In all, though I found myself occasionally losing the thread of the author's theme, I nevertheless found the content of each chapter well worth.
Average customer rating:
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Exploring Nature's Dynamics (Wiley Series in Nonlinear Science)
E. Atlee Jackson
Manufacturer: Wiley-Interscience
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Chaos & Systems
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ASIN: 0471191469 |
Book Description
Explore the remarkable variety of nature's dynamics
The development of the computer over the latter half of the twentieth century has greatly advanced our ability to explore the complex dynamics that occur in nature. With the aid of the computer, we can now study nonlinear types of dynamics that cannot generally be studied by mathematics. Realistic computer models of natural dynamics can now be developed, and even the simplest have uncovered remarkable and unexpected types of natural dynamics.
Researchers have found that simple dynamic actions over short periods of time can produce long-term dynamics that were never dreamt of in the past. Even the smallest changes in a system's short-time behavior can have enormous effects on the future of the system. Slightly different initial configurations can also produce very different future dynamics, which is now recognized as the important "sensitivity" feature of many dynamic systems.
Exploring Nature's Dynamics offers an introductory opportunity to learn about-and explore for yourself-some of the diverse forms of dynamics that occur in nature's reproduction processes. These forms include the competitive and cooperative interactions between species, neurological behaviors, dynamic spatial organizations, and the amazing constructive contributions of chaotic dynamics to our minds and hearts, the evolution of our solar system, and the human species itself. All you need to explore these ideas is a healthy curiosity and your own imagination. The accompanying disk includes simple Qbasic computer programs that allow you to witness dynamic systems at work. The methods for using these programs-and for making modifications based on your own creativity-are fully explained for people who have never used computer programs before. So come explore!
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