Author: James Gleick
Spiritual Bias: Unknown
Origins Bias: Unknown
Rating: Middle of the Road+
Level: Intermediate
Comments: Chaos theory is a bold and fairly new field that is making waves in scientific circles. And while chaos theory isn't in the middle of every discussion on origins, it certainly has a place. This is because chaos theory makes a statement regarding the presumed randomness that we find in many physical phenomena. In fact, chaos theory says that in many cases this randomness is just a veil, behind which is hidden order.
'Chaos' will take you through the evolution of such thinking in an enjoyable and easily understandable way. The reader can expect to experience all of the key concepts: fractals, hidden order, self-similarity, the Butterfly effect, and Lorenz attractors. And while there are probably books that are more technical and spend more time in the bowels of the theory, this book is a great choice for someone with a casual interest in the basic principles of Chaos theory.
I certainly enjoyed it. It is no surprise that this book was a national best-seller.
Sample Quotes: "There is no randomness in the Mandlebrot set," Hubbard said. "There is no randomness in anything that I do. Neither do I think that the possibility of randomness has any direct relevance to biology. In biology randomness is death, chaos is death. Everything is highly structured. When you clone plants, the order in which the branches come out is exactly the same. The Mandlebrot set obeys an extraordinarily precise scheme leaving nothing to chance whatsoever. I strongly suspect that the day somebody actually figures out how the brain is organized they will discover to their amazement that there is a coding scheme for building the brain which is of extraordinary precision. The idea of randomness in biology is just reflex."
"The fractal structure nature has devised works so efficiently that, in most tissue, no cell is ever more than three or four cells away from a blood vessel. Yet the vessels and blood take up little space, no more than about five percent of the body."
"Pattern born amid formlessness: that is biology's basic beauty and its basic mystery. Life sucks order from a sea of disorder. Erwin Schrodinger, the quantum pioneer and one of several physicists who made a nonspecialist's foray into biological speculation, put it this way forty years ago: A living organism has the "astonishing gift of concentrating a 'stream of order' on itself and thus escaping the decay into atomic chaos."
