Chaos

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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. Telephony reduced the barriers to telecommunication by reducing the middle man, saved money for businesses by reducing the need for messengers and increasing the speed of messages. Telephony also drove further information technology innovations. Phone companies (or THE phone company at the time) devoted considerable resources to dealing with problems of long distance transmission of voice information over inherently "lossy" copper wires. Sifting meaningful signal from distance-induced static and noise became of focus of some particularly talented engineers. Analysis of this problem lead to mathematical abstractions as they tried to reduce "information" to the lowest possible common denominator. How small of a signal can carry a message? How can "message" be defined mathematically? The idea of the "bit" became common and the field of information theory began to take off. It had existed before, but it had never flowered in the way that modern communications forced it to. Claude Shannon is a central figure in the development of modern information theory and his revolutionary ideas are quoted extensively throughout the book. Parallel developments in information theory occurred with Alan Turing who developed the theoretical basis for computing before any of the hardware existed. Meisel, Martin (Spring 1988). "Review of Chaos: Making a New Science". The Wilson Quarterly. 12 (2): 138–140. ISSN 0363-3276. JSTOR 40257307.

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. Chaos: Making a New Science was the first popular book about chaos theory. It describes the Mandelbrot set, Julia sets, and Lorenz attractors without using complicated mathematics. It portrays the efforts of dozens of scientists whose separate work contributed to the developing field. The text remains in print and is widely used as an introduction to the topic for the mathematical layperson. The book approaches the history of chaos theory chronologically, starting with Edward Norton Lorenz and the butterfly effect, through Mitchell Feigenbaum, and ending with more modern applications.If you are into that sort of thing, then this book will be a fun read for you. I found it extremely fascinating. Kendig, Frank (1987-10-15). "Books: Third Scientific Revolution of the Century (Published 1987)". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 2020-12-22. Frenkel, Karen A. (1 February 2007). "Why Aren't More Women Physicists?". Scientific American. 296 (2): 90–92. Bibcode: 2007SciAm.296b..90F. doi: 10.1038/scientificamerican0207-90 . Retrieved 11 July 2017. 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 book covers chaos theory under the lens of four themes: sensitive dependence on initial conditions, self-similarity, universality, and nonlinearity. [5]

They’d no idea how fragile, unstable, and chaotic physical systems like the Earth’s weather really are. It took a mathematically-minded meteorologist to demonstrate this. One day in 1961, he wanted to rerun a simulation from the day before. But he decided to start in the middle of the simulation, typing in the numbers from the previous printout by hand. I am not a math and science whiz by any stretch of the imagination; I am, however, in awe of both and always have been. As far as I’m concerned, it takes a bazillion times more creativity to discover and prove a math or science concept than it does to write a story or poem. Literature is limited by the human experience and needs no proof. Math and science have no limits—think universe and ∞—and if you are unable to prove your theory, you will not become a part of the conversation unless, of course, someone else can prove your theory. Pepinsky, Hal (Spring 1990). "Reproducing Violence: A Review Essay". Social Justice. 17 (1 (39)): 155–172. ISSN 1043-1578. JSTOR 29766530. National Book Awards - 1987". Chaos: Making a New Science. National Book Foundation . Retrieved 28 May 2011.In 1960, Edward Lorenz began running a weather simulation on his brand new computer. He wanted to study how weather patterns change over time. And he stumbled on something deeply unsettling.

An enhanced ebook edition was released by Open Road Media in 2011, adding embedded video and hyperlinked notes. [6] Reception [ edit ]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. 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). At the beginning, the second simulation behaved just like the first. But then, the variables’ behavior started deviating. As simulated time went on, they got more and more out of sync. Finally, the motion of the second graph looked totally different from the first. While the book is certainly "technical", it is well within the range of anyone who is not afraid of math and willing to spend a little time considering what it says. I ended up spending about a week or so reading the book, a long time for me, because it takes time to digest some of the material and understand what it is saying. For our cousins: .- -- . .-. .. -.-. .- / .... .- ... / ..-. .- .-.. .-.. . -. -.-.-- / .-- . / -.-. .- .-.. .-.. / ..- .--. --- -. / -.-- --- ..- -.-.--

which says that you can't look at a quantum particle without effecting it, so in effect the intercepter cannot go undetected! This blew my mind. I loved reading the more philosophical chapters about how we have too much information for us to ever process, and how we must now deal with it. I loved reading about the library of babel and borges of course, how could I not? I loved thinking about how we have too much information and how everything is documented. "It did not occur to Sophocle's audiences that it would be sad for his plays to be lost; they enjoyed the show". I thought about that and I thought Shlesinger, Michael F. (March 1988). "Book review: Chaos: Making a new science". Journal of Statistical Physics. 50 (5–6): 1285–1286. Bibcode: 1988JSP....50.1285S. doi: 10.1007/BF01019170. ISSN 0022-4715. S2CID 122110686. 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]

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I enjoyed reading this book thoroughly. However, I do not think it will satisfy everyone who is considering reading it. I know many of my librarian colleagues and my classmates from the School of Information probably have this on their to-read lists. Many of them are probably more interested in contemporary issues of information management, such as information retrieval, social network analysis and human-computer interaction. This book touches some of those issues, and indeed many others, but this book is primarily about the history of information theory. The subtitle of the book is "A History, A Theory, A Flood," but the Flood part is only discussed in the final chapters. The rest of it is devoted to the theory and history.