Chaos

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Apparently this book made a big splash when it was first published. I remember the excitement around chaos theory and fractals at the time. Artigiani, Robert (Winter 1990). "Review of Chaos: Making A New Science". Naval War College Review. 43 (1): 133–136. ISSN 0028-1484. JSTOR 44638368.

Here’s the key message: Meteorologist Edward Lorenz became the intellectual father of chaos theory after discovering the unpredictability of weather. 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.

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. Succeeding chapters cover technologies we typically associate with the transmission of information: telegraphy and telephony. Telegraphy introduces the idea of creating one set of symbols that can represent another set. In this case, dots and dashes for an alphabet. Twenty six characters are reduced to two. Telegraphy also introduced the need to reduce even further the number of characters by which a message could be clearly received, as in representing common phrases by a series of three digit numbers. Such a reduction costs the transmitter less money to send and enables the owner of the system to send more messages in the same time, earning them more money. This is information compression in its simplest form. Sending a message through an intermediary (a telegrapher) also means that you might want to hide the meaning of the message from them. This leads to ciphers and other methods of encoding. The sender and the receiver share a common key for decoding. An awe-inspiring book. Reading it gave me that sensation that someone had just found the light switch.” —Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Lorenz dubbed it the butterfly effect. This means systems like our weather are so sensitive to small disturbances that a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing today could be responsible for a raging storm next month in New York. In science-speak, this is also known as “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” – and it became the cornerstone of the new field of chaos theory. I know this implication of butterfly effect in popular culture is often erroneous. Because it's almost always impossible to know what factors actually tipped off a particular system. But there are always chances that changes in initial condition might accumulate into something different. Or they may not - maybe things happen inevitably. However, we have no way to learn!

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.Loevinger, Lee (Summer 1988). "Review of Chaos: Making a New Science". Jurimetrics. 28 (4): 505–509. ISSN 0897-1277. JSTOR 29762101. At the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in 1974, staff and police were growing a bit concerned. A disheveled-looking man was walking around the campus at night, chain-smoking and pacing erratically.

He worked for two months without pause. His functional day was twenty-two hours. He would try to go to sleep in a kind of buzz, and awaken two hours later with his thoughts exactly where he had left them. His diet was strictly coffee. (Even when healthy and at peace, Feigenbaum subsisted exclusively on the reddest possible meat, coffee, and red wine. His friends speculated that he must be getting his vitamins from cigarettes.) In the end, a doctor called it off. He prescribed a modest regimen of Valium and an enforced vacation. But by then Feigenbaum had created a universal theory.”

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.” Bolch, Ben W. (January 1989). "Review of Chaos: Making a New Science". Southern Economic Journal. 55 (3): 779–780. doi: 10.2307/1059589. ISSN 0038-4038. JSTOR 1059589. I found it quite informative, especially in communicating what it would perhaps be like working in science at an exciting time. However there were many sections that bored me and aperiodic jumps in his focus that left me lost a bit. However, apart from all these philosophical implications about life, I really wanted to learn a bit of science behind chaos theory. This is my 2nd attempt at this book almost 2 years later and the book is still uninteresting as it was before. I believe this is one of the most "overrated" books out there. The book is hugely popular, always comes at first when you are looking for recommendations about chaos theory books. So, first time I really had doubts about myself. I thought maybe I am not doing justice to this book. I still had my doubts this time. So, I spent substantial amount of my time behind this book. And I think I have done enough and cannot do anything more for this book.

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.” In all of science there lie deep and irresolute fissures that necessitate the existence of many mutually exclusive domains of knowledge. Each with its own lexicon, icons, dogmas, turfs to defend and legacies to uphold. Each operating relatively independently with little communication with or interest in what goes on outside their four walls. By any objective measure, the modern business of “psychopharmacology”—the use of drugs to treat everything from anxiety and insomnia to schizophrenia itself—has to be judged a failure. Few patients, if any, are cured. The most violent manifestations of mental illness can be controlled, but with what long-term consequences, no one knows.” Devaney, Robert L. (November 1989). "Review of Chaos: Making a New Science". The College Mathematics Journal. 20 (5): 458–459. doi: 10.2307/2686940. ISSN 0746-8342. JSTOR 2686940. Have you got that? Fortunately, the book doesn't often get this deep and right after the above quote the author leaves the theory for the flood section - much easier to swallow!Look. In the distance. Do you see the light? The lantern in the tower, the fire signal; it has lit.