Chaos : making a new science / James Gleick.

Format:

• Book

Author/Creator:

• Gleick, James.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

• Chaotic behavior in systems.

Physical Description:

xi, 352 pages, 10 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

New York, N.Y., U.S.A. : Penguin, 1988, c1987.

Summary:

Chaos records the birth of a new science. This new science offers a way of seeing order and pattern where formerly only the random, the erratic, the unpredictable - in short, the chaotic - had been observed. In the words of Douglas Hofstadter, "It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order." Although highly mathematical in origin, chaos is a science of the everyday world, addressing questions every child has wondered about: how clouds form, how smoke rises, how water eddies in a stream. Chaos is a history of discovery. It chronicles, in the words of the scientists themselves, their conflicts and frustrations, their emotions and moments of revelation. After reading Chaos, you will never look at the world in quite the same way again.

Contents:

• The Butterfly Effect 9
• Edward Lorenz and his toy weather
• The computer misbehaves
• Long-range forecasting is doomed
• Order masquerading as randomness
• A world of nonlinearity
• "We completely missed the point"
• Revolution 33
• A revolution in seeing
• Pendulum clocks, space balls, and playground swings
• The invention of the horseshoe
• A mystery solved: Jupiter's Great Red Spot
• Life's Ups and Downs 57
• Modeling wildlife populations
• Nonlinear science, "the study of non-elephant animals"
• Pitchfork bifurcations and a ride on the Spree
• A movie of chaos and a messianic appeal
• A Geometry of Nature 81
• 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"
• Strange Attractors 119
• 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"
• Universality 155
• A new start at Los Alamos
• The renormalization group
• Decoding color
• The rise of numerical experimentation
• Mitchell Feigenbaum's break-through
• A universal theory
• The rejection letters
• Meeting in Como
• Clouds and paintings
• The Experimenter 189
• 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
• Images of Chaos 213
• The complex plane
• Surprise in Newton's method
• The Mandelbrot set: sprouts and tendrils
• Art and commerce meet science
• Fractal basin boundaries
• The chaos game
• The Dynamical Systems Collective 241
• 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
• Inner Rhythms 273
• A misunderstanding about models
• The complex body
• The dynamical heart
• Resetting the biological clock
• Fatal arrhythmia
• Chick embryos and abnormal beats
• Chaos as health
• Chaos and Beyond 301
• New beliefs, new definitions
• The Second Law, the snowflake puzzle, and loaded dice
• Opportunity and necessity.

Notes:

• Bibliography: pages 318-340.
• Includes index.

ISBN:

0140092501 :

OCLC:

18019169