Saturday, April 15, 2006

[BookReview] Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick

"See the Universe in a Grain of Sand, the mini-whirl pool of your swirling tea or the arch of a tendril, the milky mountains in the sky..."

Beauty lies all around and so does turmoil and disorder otherwise known as Chaos!!

Chaotic systems like a kettle of water or weather have a surprising 'eye of the storm' kinda quality. Self organizing systems tend to find order in chaos.

For example during a heart attack a persons neurons misfire and make the heart beat erratic. The standard method is to shock the heart back into order. How does adding more chaos into an already chaotic event bring about order??!! That is what is known as a self organizing system.

Did you know that our body itself has such an amazing design that no cell in the body is more than 2-3 cells away from the blood distribution system. No distribution system invented by man is so accessible.

I was so obsessed with what I read in this book that I got a temporary nickname "Captain Chaos!!"

Written by a Journalist - James Gleick - about the abstruse world of Physics and Mathematics, it tells the gripping tale of how Chaos and Order are 2 sides of the same coin.... Since he's a journalist and not a physicist he tends to bring out the essentials without submerging into formulas... Also the human element of the people involved in the evolution of this field of science makes the tale more tangible.

See Also: 
Link to Author website on Chaos
Book Link to Amazon

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