Chaos: Making a New Science

This is not a purely technical book. Instead, it focuses as much on the scientists studying chaos as on the chaos itself. In the pages of Gleick's book, the reader meets dozens of extraordinary and eccentric people. For instance, Mitchell Feigenbaum, who constructed and regulated his life by a 26-hour clock and watched his waking hours come in and out of phase with those of his coworkers at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

As for chaos itself, Gleick does an outstanding job of explaining the thought processes and investigative techniques that researchers bring to bear on chaos problems. Rather than attempt to explain Julia sets, Lorenz attractors, and the Mandelbrot Set with gigantically complicated equations, Chaos relies on sketches, photographs, and Gleick's wonderful descriptive prose.

Product Description
James Gleick explains the theories behind the fascinating new science called chaos. Alongside relativity and quantum mechanics, it is being hailed as the twentieth century's third revolution. 8 pages of photos.

Gleick accomplishes an impressive feat in his chronicle of chaos' brief history. He skillfully interweaves the characters, their ideas, and the interactions among characters and ideas into a seamless story so as to give the reader an accurate sense of how chaos theory evolved over the course of a couple of decades.

While "Chaos" does not delve into the mathematics, it provides enough detail for readers with technical backgrounds to make the appropriate connections and develop a more complete understanding of chaos. Gleick also provides a thorough list of endnotes for additional reading.

Enjoy. This book will both entertain and astound you.


Making Chaos Clear   January 19, 2000
Bruce Lawrence (Del Mar, CA USA)
13 out of 13 found this review helpful

This is one of the finest books I have ever read. It explains a difficult subject with clarity and enthusiasm. It should open your eyes to an entirely new way of viewing the world around you - not the linear world of cause and effect, but a world where things are not always as they appear. Gleick compells you along with his fine writing and obvious love for the subject. A great read for the scientifically inclined and the curious.


Changing the way you look at the world   May 18, 2001
Christopher J Truffer (Sykesville, Maryland United States)
10 out of 10 found this review helpful

I first read "Chaos" in high school, and then re-read it later. This is an excellent first book in chaos theory, and it treats a bit more scientifically and thoroughly than "Jurassic Park," which seems to be most people's first venture into chaos.

Gleick does an excellent, excellent job of writing an accessible book. A person with a good education and an open and curious mind will be able to read this book. I found a second reading of the book helped my understanding immensely, as some of the concepts are a little hard to comprehend. Gleick not only writes at a level accessible to most, but he also keeps the book compelling, with focus on the scientists and mathematicians who first broke ground in chaos theory, as well as some more concrete examples of how chaos theory permeates our world and increasingly our understanding of it.

This changed the way I looked at the world. The chaos-order link is astonishing, and I found a new respect and awe for nature . . . rivers, clouds, trees, mountains . . . it's literally everywhere. This is an excellent book for the inquisitive and thoughtful, especially for those with interests in mathematics or science.


Excellent qualitative introduction to chaos   September 23, 2002
A.J. (Maryland)
9 out of 9 found this review helpful

1987 was the right time for a book like "Chaos," about the recent developments of a relatively new and exciting mathematical phenomenon that might interest a general public for whom higher mathematics normally has slightly less appeal than a root canal. It seems a little dated in 2002, especially with regard to the enormous interim advances in computing power, but James Gleick's book still provides valuable insight into potentially one of the most effective and revolutionary mathematical tools that may solve complex problems in science and engineering that have been baffling mankind for centuries.

Many processes and systems in nature can be modeled mathematically with differential equations, which are useful to scientists and engineers to predict and design things to improve the standard of living. Unfortunately, most of these systems are nonlinear, meaning that adding to an input does not produce the same addition to the output and that scaling an input does not scale the output in proportion, and the equations they yield cannot be solved in closed form without applying some judicious and optimistic simplifications. In particular, most systems have what is called "sensitive dependence to initial conditions" -- small changes in the input to the system can lead to large, unpredictable, and uncontrollable changes in the output, a phenomenon summarily called the Butterfly Effect.

The main point Gleick makes is that chaos is not total randomness, but rather randomness within certain generalities. For example, summers can be expected to be generally warm and winters generally cold, but specifics like thunderstorms and blizzards can't be predicted due to turbulence and the nonlinear nature of the Navier-Stokes equation, the defining equation of fluid dynamics. There is indeed order in chaos (as illustrated by fractals); it just needs to be identified and codified. To that effect, the book offers many pretty, colorful pictures of various representations of chaos: the Lorenz attractor, the Mandelbrot set, the Koch snowflake (a paradoxical finite area surrounded by an infinite perimeter), the Sierpinski carpet, and the Menger sponge (a paradoxical solid of infinite surface area yet zero volume).

Gleick discusses the origins of the study of chaos and its applications to different sciences -- physiology (heart rhythms, dimensions of organs), biology (animal populations), even economics. The writing is very good, explanatory without resorting to textbook-like rigidity, and not at all math-intensive -- very few equations are presented (in fact, I would have liked to have seen more). A reader who is familiar with differential equations (and how they describe physical systems) and calculus (and how it is used as a tool to solve linear differential equations) will have an easier time with the concepts, but rest assured this is a book for everybody.