They’d no idea how fragile, unstable, and chaotic physical systems like the Earth’s weather really are. It took a mathematically-minded meteorologist to demonstrate this. 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 New beliefs, new definitions. The Second Law, the snowflake puzzle, and loaded dice. Opportunity and necessity.

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.” The book could have benefited from a lecture style presentation, with clear chapter introductions and summaries, so that I could see how it all fit together, not to mention what year he was currently talking about. Frankly a visual Timeline would have done wonders.A new start at Los Alamos. The renormalization group. Decoding color. The rise of numerical experimentation. Mitchell Feigenbaum’s breakthrough. A universal theory. The rejection letters. Meeting in Como. Clouds and paintings. Apparently this book made a big splash when it was first published. I remember the excitement around chaos theory and fractals at the time. 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. 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.

My big grievance with this book is it falls too short. His narrative is compelling, yes, the stories are interesting, sure, but he doesn't grab the central characters as well as a new journalist like John McPhee does. He floats too far above the actual science and complexity. He shows you pictures and dances around the pools of chaos and clouds of complexity, but never actually puts the reader INTO the churning water or shoots the reader into energized, cumuliform heaps. Balazs, Nandor (March 1989). "Review of Chaos: Making a New Science". The Quarterly Review of Biology. 64 (1): 112–113. doi: 10.1086/416224. ISSN 0033-5770. JSTOR 2831779. Kendig, Frank (1987-10-15). "Books: Third Scientific Revolution of the Century (Published 1987)". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 2020-12-22. Shlesinger, Michael F. (March 1988). "Book review: Chaos: Making a new science". Journal of Statistical Physics. 50 (5–6): 1285–1286. Bibcode: 1988JSP....50.1285S. doi: 10.1007/BF01019170. ISSN 0022-4715. S2CID 122110686.The complex plane. Surprise in Newton’s method. The Mandelbrot set: sprouts and tendrils. Art and commerce meet science. Fractal basin boundaries. The chaos game. Glazier, James; Gunaratne, Gemunu (February 1988). "Chaos: Making a New Science". Physics Today. 41 (2): 79. Bibcode: 1988PhT....41b..79G. doi: 10.1063/1.2811320. ISSN 0031-9228.

Frenkel, Karen A. (1 February 2007). "Why Aren't More Women Physicists?". Scientific American. 296 (2): 90–92. Bibcode: 2007SciAm.296b..90F. doi: 10.1038/scientificamerican0207-90 . Retrieved 11 July 2017. 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! 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 ]

Success!

Hilborn, Robert C. (November 1988). "Chaos, Making a New Science". American Journal of Physics. 56 (11): 1053–1054. Bibcode: 1988AmJPh..56.1053G. doi: 10.1119/1.15345. ISSN 0002-9505. 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. Meisel, Martin (Spring 1988). "Review of Chaos: Making a New Science". The Wilson Quarterly. 12 (2): 138–140. ISSN 0363-3276. JSTOR 40257307. National Book Awards - 1987". Chaos: Making a New Science. National Book Foundation . Retrieved 28 May 2011. And I have one favorite comic story "Daytripper" which depicts so many alternate deaths a man can die in his life. Actually, really we never know, how many alternate lives we are living every time we have been able to cross one of the busy roads successfully !

Artigiani, Robert (Winter 1990). "Review of Chaos: Making A New Science". Naval War College Review. 43 (1): 133–136. ISSN 0028-1484. JSTOR 44638368. 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.

Royal Society Prize for Science Books. Shortlisted Entries". Chaos. The Royal Society . Retrieved 3 June 2011. 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. In each field, also, the initial work was most often either resisted or ignored. Precisely because chaos was popping up all over, with just a few people in each of many different scientific fields, it was easy for scientists in any field to notice a paper or presentation, note the fact that is was completely different from the methods, logic, math that had relevance for their own work, that much of the work was in fact being done in other fields--and dismiss it. For new doctoral students, there were no mentors in chaos theory, no jobs, no journals devoted to chaos theory. It completely upended ideas about how the natural world worked. It was heady, exciting--and much harder to explain than to demonstrate. Much of what the first generation of chaos scientists did is incredibly easy to demonstrate with a laptop computer today--but most of these chaos pioneers were working with handheld calculators, mainframe computers with dump terminals and limited and unreliable access for something so peripheral to the institution's perceived mission, computers whose only output device was a plotter. Bolch, Ben W. (January 1989). "Review of Chaos: Making a New Science". Southern Economic Journal. 55 (3): 779–780. doi: 10.2307/1059589. ISSN 0038-4038. JSTOR 1059589.