When the smoke ring of a cigarette rises steadily before breaking up into little curls, we might watch in fascination. That being said, this felt like a good introduction to the early history of scientists' efforts to understand and explain nonlinear systems and the apparent chaotic behavior observed in natural and man-made systems. The amazing pictures and illustrations and the quotes accompanying each chapter all add to the feeling of reading an art text book rather than a science book. However there were many sections that bored me and aperiodic jumps in his focus that left me lost a bit. Funkcioniše kao uvod i zanimljiva istorija, kao upoznavanje sa nelinearnom dinamikom, ali ne mnogo više od toga.

I believe if a person is really going to like this book, it will be as an exuberant, unregimented romp through the jungle that is information. Bits of biographies from here and there and merged in little chapters which actually don't tell you anything useful/ informative about the science of chaos theory. Truly, though, this book does a great job at explaining and giving us the unusual history of the science that brought pure mathematics out of the clouds and back into the real world, dealing with our observable reality.From Edward Lorenz’s discovery of the Butterfly Effect, to Mitchell Feigenbaum’s calculation of a universal constant, to Benoit Mandelbrot’s concept of fractals, which created a new geometry of nature, Gleick’s engaging narrative focuses on the key figures whose genius converged to chart an innovative direction for science. Or, it is analogous to saying that the information content of enigma-encrypted Wehrmacht transmissions was retrieved not by the codebreakers at Bletchly Park but by the radio operators who determined what radio frequency the messages were broadcast on. But he decided to start in the middle of the simulation, typing in the numbers from the previous printout by hand. We have a monthly book club, offer m This is a group for people who enjoy books that transport them to a different time and place through time travel. It's a case study in political factions and egos, sometimes cooperation and always wonder at seeing the world in a new way.

All-in-all it reads like pop-science with constant over-the-top enthusiasm in place of a clear, concise, solid explanation of what chaos is. A native of New York City, Gleick attended Harvard College, where he was an editor of The Harvard Crimson, graduating in 1976 with an A. Since we today generally take for granted a certain relationship between information, our minds, and our instruments, it is a major accomplishment that Gleick gets us to note that we haven't always lived this way and to think through how we got this way. This becomes problematic toward the end, where Gleick wants to unify everything under quantum information -- "it from bit" -- with the entire universe as a collection of physical-informational states.It was a finalist for the National Book Award [2] and the Pulitzer Prize [3] in 1987, and was shortlisted for the Science Book Prize in 1989. It's highly addictive to get core insights on personally relevant topics without repetition or triviality.