Chaos: Making a New Science

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His first book, Chaos: Making a New Science, reported the development of the new science of chaos and complexity. It made the Butterfly Effect a household term, introduced the Mandelbrot Set and fractal geometry to a broad audience, and sparked popular interest in the subject, influencing such diverse writers as Tom Stoppard ( Arcadia) and Michael Crichton ( Jurassic Park). [12] [13] The Pipeline [ edit ] 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.” Apparently this book made a big splash when it was first published. I remember the excitement around chaos theory and fractals at the time.

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.” In 1960, Edward Lorenz began running a weather simulation on his brand new computer. He wanted to study how weather patterns change over time. And he stumbled on something deeply unsettling. 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!Modeling wildlife populations. Nonlinear science, “the study of non-elephant animals.” Pitchfork bifurcations and a ride on the Spree. A movie of chaos and a messianic appeal. 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. New beliefs, new definitions. The Second Law, the snowflake puzzle, and loaded dice. Opportunity and necessity. The book covers chaos theory under the lens of four themes: sensitive dependence on initial conditions, self-similarity, universality, and nonlinearity. [5] Chaos: Making a New Science was the first popular book about chaos theory. It describes the Mandelbrot set, Julia sets, and Lorenz attractors without using complicated mathematics. It portrays the efforts of dozens of scientists whose separate work contributed to the developing field. The text remains in print and is widely used as an introduction to the topic for the mathematical layperson. The book approaches the history of chaos theory chronologically, starting with Edward Norton Lorenz and the butterfly effect, through Mitchell Feigenbaum, and ending with more modern applications.

One day in 1961, he wanted to rerun a simulation from the day before. But he decided to start in the middle of the simulation, typing in the numbers from the previous printout by hand. 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. Of course, they knew that it was hard to get perfect measurements on something as complicated as the weather. But they thought that with good enough data and a lot of computer power, it would be possible to calculate the weather for months ahead – at least roughly. Neat, huh? I'm totally stoked by these bad boys. Of course, we're all, yeah, we use those equations all the time now and it's old hat, but not so long ago, they were totally in left field and none of the big boys wanted to play with them.If you graph the history of cotton prices for all the years over the 140+ years of record-keeping, and then graph the prices for any period of time–one year, one decade, one week–during that period, the graphs will display the same pattern!" ـ Mandelbrot

Lewis, Peter H. (February 11, 1995). "Performance Systems Buys Pipeline Network". The New York Times . Retrieved March 23, 2009.

Michalski, Jerry (January 31, 1994). "Pipeline: Not Just Another Pretty Face" (PDF). Release 1.0. pp.9–11 . Retrieved March 23, 2009. But ultimately none of this is going to be the lasting impact of this book. The reading pleasure and the hero worship of these daredevils is transient after all. For me, the real impact is that it has changed the way I look at the ordinary everyday world - the leaves, the trees, the pebbles, the pattern on the peels of an orange - everything is strangely magnified and beautiful now. I see the poetry of constant motion and evolution everywhere and I can feel the science of Chaos intuitively as I take my long walks. I can see Strange Attractors and Fractals and unstable equilibriums in the most mundane places. And this is the greatest gift of the book. Rohde, David (21 December 1997). "Plane Crash Kills Son of Best-Selling Author". The New York Times. Santa Cruz and the sixties. The analog computer. Was this science? “A long-range vision.” Measuring unpredictability. Information theory. From microscale to macroscale. The dripping faucet. Audiovisual aids. An era ends.