Chaos

Making a New Science

James Gleick

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781453210475
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Linear & Nonlinear Programming

The New York Times –bestselling explanation of chaos theory that became a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist. Over a million copies sold!

For centuries, scientific thought was focused on bringing order to the natural world. But even as relativity and quantum mechanics undermined that rigid certainty in the first half of the twentieth century, the scientific community clung to the idea that any system, no matter how complex, could be reduced to a simple pattern. In the 1960s, a small group of radical thinkers began to take that notion apart, placing new importance on the tiny experimental irregularities that scientists had long learned to ignore. Miniscule differences in data, they said, would eventually produce massive ones—and complex systems like the weather, economics, and human behavior suddenly became clearer and more beautiful than they had ever been before.

In this seminal work of scientific writing, James Gleick lays out a cutting edge field of science with enough grace and precision that any reader will be able to grasp the science behind the beautiful complexity of the world around us. With more than a million copies sold, Chaos is "a groundbreaking book about what seems to be the future of physics" by a writer who has been a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, the author of Time Travel: A History and Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman ( Publishers Weekly).

"An awe-inspiring book. Reading it gave me that sensation that someone had just found the light switch." —Douglas Adams

INDEX

A | B | C | D | E
F | G | H | I | J
K | L | M | N | O
P | Q | R | S | T
U | V | W | X | Y

Bold–faced page numbers indicate illustrations

A

Abraham, Ralph, 52–53, 247, 267, 279

accelerators, 7, 115, 125, 263, 271

Agnew, Harold, 2

Ahlers, Günter, 127, 314

Air Force (United States), 249

air resistance, 41–42

Albers, Josef, 116, 229

American Mathematical Monthly, 69

aperiodicity, 12, 15, 139, 246

and life, 299–300

and unpredictability, 22

Apple computer, 7, 305

approximation, 15, 67–68, 210

Archimedes, 21, 39

architecture, 116–17, 229

Aristotle, 40–42

Arizona, University of, 317

Army (United States), 13

Arnold, V. L, 182

art, 94, 116–17, 186–87, 222, 229

asteroids, 14, 314

AT&T Bell Laboratories, 127, 208, 255

Atlantic Ocean, 55

atmosphere, 3, 11, 170

chaos in, 17

atomic bomb, 2, 7, 122

attractors, 237, 246, 269

basins of, 43, 233–36, 299

fixed–point (steady state), 64, 134, 227, 233, 237, 253, 255

limit cycles (oscillating), 73, 134, 227, 253, 255

stability of, 150

see also strange attractors

automobiles, 246

averages, 12, 168–69

B

Barnsley, Michael, 215–16, 220–21, 226, 236–39

baseball, 67

Bateson, Gregory, 243

bees, 316–17

Belgium, 132

bell–shaped curve, see normal distribution

Beluzov–Zhabotinsky reaction, 287

Bergé, Pierre, 127

bifurcation, 71, 73, 74–75, 76, 78, 128, 173, 204–5, 211, 215, 223, 265, 305

in physiology, 281–82, 291

see also per...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Prologue
• The Butterfly Effect
• Revolution
• Life's Ups and Downs
• A Geometry of Nature
• Strange Attractors
• Universality
• The Experimenter
• Images of Chaos
• The Dynamical Systems Collective
• Inner Rhythms
• Chaos and Beyond
• Afterword
• Notes on Sources and Further Reading
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Copyright