About this Item
"Chaos: Making a New Science", does indeed record the birth of a New Science. This new science (the science of Chaos) 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 façade 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." (From the book's blurb)
CHAPTERS :
** THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT. Edward Lorentz and his Toy Weather. Order masquerading as randomness. A World of Nonlinearity
** REVOLUTION a revolution in seeing. Pendulum clocks, space balls, swings.
** LIFE'S UPS AND DOWNS. Modeling wildlife populations. Nonlinear science. Pitchfork bifurcations.
** A GEOMETRY OF NATURE. Transmission errors and jagged shores. New Dimensions. The monsters of fractal geometry. Quakes in the schizosphere. From clouds to blood vessels.
** STRANGE ATTRACTORS. Transition in the laboratory. Rotating cylinders and a turning point. David Ruelle's idea for turbulence Loops in phase space. An astronomer's mapping.
** UNIVERSALITY. A new start at Los Alamos. The renormalization group. Decoding color. Rise of numerical experimentation. Mitchell Feigenbaum's breakthrough. A universal theory.
** THE EXPERIMENTER. 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. The complex plane. Surprise in Newton's method. The Mandelbrot Set: sprouts and tendrils. Fractal basin boundaries. The chaos game.
** THE DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS COLLECTIVE. Santa Cruz and the sixties. The analog computer. Measuring unpredictability. Information theory. form micro scale to macroscale.
** INNER RHYTHMS. A misunderstanding about models. The complex body. The dynamical heart. Resetting the biological clock. Chaos as health.
** CHAOS AND BEYOND. New beliefs, new definitions. The Second Law, the snowflake puzzle and loaded dice. Opportunity and necessity.
TITLE : Chaos : Making a New Science
AUTHOR : James Gleick
IMPRINT : Penguin Books
PLACE : New York
DATE : Circa 1990
EDITION : 8th Penguin Paperback Edition
DETAILS : Oversize trade paperback, glued; contains numerous line drawings and charts, plus a discrete section of color illustrations printed on glossy paper; has a Prologue, a Bibliography (Notes on Sources), and an Index. Size is 6" x 9"; (xiv) + (354) pages. Includes the original software promotion at the end of the book.
CONDITION -- VERY GOOD --This is a previously owned book that remains clean, sold and bright, with the following particulars noted :
EXTERIOR - Soft bumps to fore-edge corners; cover surfaces display scattered blind indentations (of no extant effect). No creasing to spine. Colors are bright.
BINDING - Solid
INTERIOR - A few pages have a bit of mild wear to corner tips, else clean and free of marking - hardly seems to have been read (or if so - with great care). Previous owner's bookplate (with name) attached to inside of front cover.
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