- 360 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
About this book
The "highly entertaining"
New York Times bestseller, which explains chaos theory and the butterfly effect, from the author of
The Information (
Chicago Tribune).
For centuries, scientific thought was focused on bringing order to the natural world. But even as relativity and quantum mechanics undermined that rigid certainty in the first half of the twentieth century, the scientific community clung to the idea that any system, no matter how complex, could be reduced to a simple pattern. In the 1960s, a small group of radical thinkers began to take that notion apart, placing new importance on the tiny experimental irregularities that scientists had long learned to ignore. Miniscule differences in data, they said, would eventually produce massive ones—and complex systems like the weather, economics, and human behavior suddenly became clearer and more beautiful than they had ever been before.
In this seminal work of scientific writing, James Gleick lays out a cutting edge field of science with enough grace and precision that any reader will be able to grasp the science behind the beautiful complexity of the world around us. With more than a million copies sold, Chaos is "a groundbreaking book about what seems to be the future of physics" by a writer who has been a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, the author of Time Travel: A History and Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman ( Publishers Weekly).
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Yes, you can access Chaos by James Gleick in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Physical Sciences & System Theory. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Topic
Physical SciencesSubtopic
System TheoryINDEX
A | B | C | D | E
F | G | H | I | J
K | L | M | N | O
P | Q | R | S | T
U | V | W | X | Y
F | G | H | I | J
K | L | M | N | O
P | Q | R | S | T
U | V | W | X | Y
Bold–faced page numbers indicate illustrations
A
Abraham, Ralph, 52–53, 247, 267, 279
accelerators, 7, 115, 125, 263, 271
Agnew, Harold, 2
Ahlers, Günter, 127, 314
Air Force (United States), 249
air resistance, 41–42
Albers, Josef, 116, 229
American Mathematical Monthly, 69
aperiodicity, 12, 15, 139, 246
and life, 299–300
and unpredictability, 22
Apple computer, 7, 305
approximation, 15, 67–68, 210
Archimedes, 21, 39
architecture, 116–17, 229
Aristotle, 40–42
Arizona, University of, 317
Army (United States), 13
Arnold, V. L, 182
art, 94, 116–17, 186–87, 222, 229
asteroids, 14, 314
AT&T Bell Laboratories, 127, 208, 255
Atlantic Ocean, 55
atmosphere, 3, 11, 170
chaos in, 17
atomic bomb, 2, 7, 122
attractors, 237, 246, 269
basins of, 43, 233–36, 299
fixed–point (steady state), 64, 134, 227, 233, 237, 253, 255
limit cycles (oscillating), 73, 134, 227, 253, 255
stability of, 150
see also strange attractors
automobiles, 246
averages, 12, 168–69
B
Barnsley, Michael, 215–16, 220–21, 226, 236–39
baseball, 67
Bateson, Gregory, 243
bees, 316–17
Belgium, 132
bell–shaped curve, see normal distribution
Beluzov–Zhabotinsky reaction, 287
Bergé, Pierre, 127
bifurcation, 71, 73, 74–75, 76, 78, 128, 173, 204–5, 211, 215, 223, 265, 305
in physiology, 281–82, 291
see also per...
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Prologue
- The Butterfly Effect
- Revolution
- Life's Ups and Downs
- A Geometry of Nature
- Strange Attractors
- Universality
- The Experimenter
- Images of Chaos
- The Dynamical Systems Collective
- Inner Rhythms
- Chaos and Beyond
- Afterword
- Notes on Sources and Further Reading
- Acknowledgments
- Index
- Copyright