Few writers distinguish themselves by their ability to write about complicated, even obscure topics clearly and engagingly. In Chaos, James ...
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Feb 12, 2012
Riku
rated it: 
Chaos: The Tip of a Giant Iceberg
Gleick only gives an introduction about the actual science and beauty of Chaos. Instead he focusses on giving a poetic account of the scientists who first stumbled on it and their great surprise and the struggles form the narrative crux of the book.
While some may say this makes it a less informative book, for me this made it one of the most intriguing non-fiction books I have read. Gleick's way of telling the stories makes the reader share More...
Gleick only gives an introduction about the actual science and beauty of Chaos. Instead he focusses on giving a poetic account of the scientists who first stumbled on it and their great surprise and the struggles form the narrative crux of the book.
While some may say this makes it a less informative book, for me this made it one of the most intriguing non-fiction books I have read. Gleick's way of telling the stories makes the reader share More...
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Sep 24, 2008
Jeff
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I finally read the book that ought to have been required reading for freshman physics majors for the past 20 years! The other day when the radio announcer reported the length of the Florida coastline, I found myself wondering what length measuring stick was used. It is interesting to contemplate how much of the themes of this book have migrated into the modern cultural consciousness. Then, you may wind up contemplating how much of that migration was due to Jeff Goldblum's ham-fisted illustrati
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Feb 08, 2009
There is not much one can say about this book that is not on the cover. I am just one more person praising its contents. The notion that the paradigm of science could turn its self over is astounding. In out lifetime it went from the study of all things orderly to included all things disorderly. I was heavily into science as a child and majored in Biochemistry in college but I never saw this. Perhaps I would have had to have taken a history of science course. Even then. I knew about the butterfl
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Sep 20, 2011
Nilesh
rated it:
The sad thing is that I lived so much of life without ever coming across fractals.
I have not learned as much new in a single book ever. From the coastline length concept to Mandlebrot Sets, Feibengaum constants to Lorenz attractors, Julia sets and Cantor sets, the world of non-linear mathematics that is even at the fringe of linear mathematic is deep and beautiful (literally). The concepts of fractional dimensions, bounded areas with infinite perimeters, mode-locking, bifurcations, Ne More...
I have not learned as much new in a single book ever. From the coastline length concept to Mandlebrot Sets, Feibengaum constants to Lorenz attractors, Julia sets and Cantor sets, the world of non-linear mathematics that is even at the fringe of linear mathematic is deep and beautiful (literally). The concepts of fractional dimensions, bounded areas with infinite perimeters, mode-locking, bifurcations, Ne More...
Feb 03, 2011
Kevin
rated it:
From my review on Amazon:
Drawing on examples form biology to astronomy, Gleick manages to make a complicated subject appealing to people from all scientific and mathematical backgrounds. I would not reccomend this book for the general layperson though, unless that person has a sincere scientific interest.
Gleick's logic is easy to follow and Appears complete. Though drawing from so many examples, I sometimes had the feeling that parts were repetitive. I did appreciate his thorough More...
Drawing on examples form biology to astronomy, Gleick manages to make a complicated subject appealing to people from all scientific and mathematical backgrounds. I would not reccomend this book for the general layperson though, unless that person has a sincere scientific interest.
Gleick's logic is easy to follow and Appears complete. Though drawing from so many examples, I sometimes had the feeling that parts were repetitive. I did appreciate his thorough More...
Oct 01, 2009
Matthew
rated it:
reads like a documentary into the creation of a new science, a (I hate saying this, so overused) paradigm shifting look at how we think of complex systems. A must read for anyone into any of the sciences, they all apply equally well and are all a part of the history of chaos.
In a nutshell, chaos is a state brought about by deterministic equations (think about that) that do not settle into an equilibrium and do not display a coherent pattern.
An example frequently cited is the weathe More...
In a nutshell, chaos is a state brought about by deterministic equations (think about that) that do not settle into an equilibrium and do not display a coherent pattern.
An example frequently cited is the weathe More...
Sep 13, 2011
Lis
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This book, over two decades old now, is one of the great classics of science popularization. It was a blockbuster bestseller at the time, and it's still well worth reading, a fascinating, enjoyable introduction to one of the most important scientific developments of our time--the birth of chaos theory.
One of the compelling features of the chaos story is that this scientific breakthrough wasn't a physics, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, or biology breakthrough; it was all of them. More...
One of the compelling features of the chaos story is that this scientific breakthrough wasn't a physics, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, or biology breakthrough; it was all of them. More...
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Aug 11, 2011
Not just pretty pictures: We all luv a good mandelbrot set - and I am no exception. For a first forage into non-fiction science reading weilding my GCSE double science i disembarked from reading this book reasonably unscathed and with seeds of ideas planted in my head! Fuck knows if I can remember most of it but some of those details, in the origins of chaos and its exposition by people unifying the different fields of study in history were engaging. As a none mathermetician I thought there were
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Jul 05, 2011
مرتضى
rated it: 
للوهلة الأولى لدى تصفحك للكتاب ستظن أن الترجمة سيئة للغاية ؛ لعدم فهمك أي شيء، ولكن بعد مضيك قدماً للفصل الثاني أو الثالث ستعرف أن الكتاب برمته بالنسبة لك فادح السوء.
برأيي أنه ليس فادح السوء بذاته و لكنه سيء لقارئ عادي فهو يصلح للعلماء الفيزيائين وليس للهواة أو الراغبين بالزيادة الثقافية.
فكرة الكتاب العامة :
تدور فكرته حول جانب من جوانب علم الفيزياء الغامضة جداً بالنسبة للعلماء و التي أقعدتهم على حيرة ، وهي كيفية تأثير الأشياء على بعضها البعض و عدم تأثيرها More...
برأيي أنه ليس فادح السوء بذاته و لكنه سيء لقارئ عادي فهو يصلح للعلماء الفيزيائين وليس للهواة أو الراغبين بالزيادة الثقافية.
فكرة الكتاب العامة :
تدور فكرته حول جانب من جوانب علم الفيزياء الغامضة جداً بالنسبة للعلماء و التي أقعدتهم على حيرة ، وهي كيفية تأثير الأشياء على بعضها البعض و عدم تأثيرها More...
Nov 08, 2010
Gendou
rated it:
Not so much a new science as an old obsession of a few mystics... :(
Gleick gives an unorganized overview some fun mathematical concepts like fractals, strange attractors, and chaos theory.
But he exaggerates the importance of these topics, presenting them as a holistic revolution in physics, overthrowing reductionism, which just isn't the case.
The last chapter was incomprehensible hippie mysticism, then the book just ended leaving me wondering what the whole point was.
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Gleick gives an unorganized overview some fun mathematical concepts like fractals, strange attractors, and chaos theory.
But he exaggerates the importance of these topics, presenting them as a holistic revolution in physics, overthrowing reductionism, which just isn't the case.
The last chapter was incomprehensible hippie mysticism, then the book just ended leaving me wondering what the whole point was.
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Oct 21, 2011
Norman
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"Chaos" is a good narrative about the evolution of this new way of study. All along, science has battled with strange results in experimentation. Now there are ways to deal with and use such spurious data.
I wish that my high school physics and chemistry teachers would have grasped the methods of chaos-study and passed simple explanations of it along to me. It is truly a complex study method, yet its overreaching goal is to simplify. That simplification NEEDS to be passed al More...
I wish that my high school physics and chemistry teachers would have grasped the methods of chaos-study and passed simple explanations of it along to me. It is truly a complex study method, yet its overreaching goal is to simplify. That simplification NEEDS to be passed al More...
Nov 29, 2011
Nicholas
rated it: 
At first I was put off by the age of this book, it being written in the mid 80's, then I did a few searches and found it still topped the charts in this particular area.
The book charts the history of the development of chaos theory from the first serious considerations of it in meteorology,to its general acceptance and applicability across the scientific community.It is as non-technical as its possible to be in subject of this nature and what mathematical explanations there are, are str More...
The book charts the history of the development of chaos theory from the first serious considerations of it in meteorology,to its general acceptance and applicability across the scientific community.It is as non-technical as its possible to be in subject of this nature and what mathematical explanations there are, are str More...
Jan 20, 2011
Brian
rated it:
Remember when you were in school and learned about linear equations and later on linear differential equations (a block on a spring is a classic textbook example) and you thought to yourself how elegantly this system is described by this equation? For the most part this thought recurred to me throughout my schooling and did not get any better when I had moved on to more advanced equations and mathematical models only to be presented with the ever-present qualifier that friction is ignored, or ai
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Oct 04, 2010
Brian
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Gleick is a great writer tackling a fascinating, free-wheeling subject here. I read this then re-read it a few years ago, and it's almost as interesting to see how the metaphors and frames of chaos/complexity theory have filtered into the broader culture as it is to read about how a new "science" comes into being. The seminal story Gleick tells here about a weather simulator that exhibited random behavior despite operating unflawed, and on a fixed set of variables, is great, not least
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Aug 16, 2011
Pete
rated it:
A fascinating, philosophical and highly readable account of the development of Chaos mathematics that manages in the narrative to convey the excitement and wonder of the original discoveries with an explanation of the diverse areas of research and fields of study in which it is applicable whilst, for the most part, avoiding unnecessarily over technical language. This book shows that rather than being one single discipline, chaos maths is rather a loose grouping of theories and applicati More...
Oct 25, 2011
Koen
rated it:
Too heavy on human interest, too light on maths, and Gleick has read more Kuhn than is good for him. It's another journalist writing about mathematics, though this one anticipated the Wikipedia Age by two decades. While he does exhibit a fair degree of sloppiness (``unbounded'' is not a synonym for ``infinite'', ``infinite'' does not mean ``quite big''), Chaos actually isn't all that bad as a fairly shallow introduction to chaos theory. It's not what I was looking for, but exactly what I expecte
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Nov 11, 2011
Alex
rated it:
This book was a real eye opener into the chaotic underpinnings of all natural systems as well as in mathematics.
You don't need to be a theoretical physicist or hardcore mathematician to read this book (although it might help), but I recommend some experience of scientific and/or abstract thinking to get the most out it. But I guess if you find chaos theory interesting this is probably not your first scientific endeavour... ;)
I especially found the theories of chaos driven hu More...
You don't need to be a theoretical physicist or hardcore mathematician to read this book (although it might help), but I recommend some experience of scientific and/or abstract thinking to get the most out it. But I guess if you find chaos theory interesting this is probably not your first scientific endeavour... ;)
I especially found the theories of chaos driven hu More...
Apr 02, 2011
Madison
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Chaos: Making a New Science provided an accessible look into the birth of chaos theory. James Gleick describes numerous scientists working on the fringes of their fields to find disorder in what was previously considered experimental error, and finding surprising patterns. One passage on Benoit Mandelbrot's investigation of static in one of IBM's research labs illustrates Gleick's characteristic style:
"By talking to the engineers, Mandelbrot soon learned that there was a piece of More...
"By talking to the engineers, Mandelbrot soon learned that there was a piece of More...
Sep 09, 2009
Huyen
rated it:
in the spirit of chaos, JG writes this strangely attractive book in an unpredictably aperiodically chaotic fashion, I never understand the messy structure of this book. sometimes he follows through the development of an idea very thoroughly, sometimes he randomly introduces something and then moves on to another guy who seems to be totally unrelated to the previous guy. There's not enough math for my liking and too much rambling about the scientists rather than what they actually did. Although I
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Nov 13, 2008
Chaos: Making a New Science is about a variety of topics: the sensitivity of some systems to their initial conditions, the weather being a prime example, which makes detailed long-term forecasting impossible; nonlinear systems; fractals; strange attractors; dynamical systems; etc. It is also about the people who discovered and studied these phenomena. It describes their difficulties in introducing these ideas into the scientific community. That's not an unusual situation in science. Einstein
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Sep 25, 2009
Dolly
rated it:
This was reviewed as being a science book that is written in terms that even a layman could understand, bringing the science of chaos into perspective. What I understood from reading the book is that there is beauty and order in chaos. And that more things are chaotic than we previously thought. I really enjoyed the historical perspective and the amazing "discoveries" that were being made almost simultaneously across the globe. I also liked the personal background and descriptions
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Jul 30, 2008
Matt
rated it:
Gleick's Chaos wasn't quite the book I was expecting: rather than an introductory primer to the science of Chaos, it's much more a history of Chaos' development. This can be good or bad, depending on your familiarity with the subject. Having taken an entire class on fractals, I was somewhat disappointed to find the actual science somewhat light - although, I have no idea whether my limited knowledge of math would really allow much deeper understanding.
What makes Chaos fascinating More...
What makes Chaos fascinating More...
Jun 26, 2008
Ron
rated it:
As a no-scientist, I often find myself lost when trying to absorb writing about scintific activity. I very much enjoyed reading about the PROCESS described in the book, and also enjoyed the author's attmepts to show scientists as fallible human beings with all-too-familiar foibles and prejudices. I'm sure that by now (2008), the knowledge and the tools available for chaos research have evolved considerably, and much of what we read in the book has been superseded by additional thought and discov
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Jun 20, 2009
DJ
rated it:
The story of a new science of simulations and images that shattered our intuition that the laws of a system are all there is to know, Gleick's profile offers many interesting insights into how science is done.
Chaos, like many new fields of science, began as a uniquely colloborative and truly interdisciplinary effort. Without established institutes, journals, or even a name, the field began as a loose collection of biologists, meteorologists, mathematicians, physicists, and others, s More...
Chaos, like many new fields of science, began as a uniquely colloborative and truly interdisciplinary effort. Without established institutes, journals, or even a name, the field began as a loose collection of biologists, meteorologists, mathematicians, physicists, and others, s More...
Aug 23, 2007
Sam
rated it:
Let's get metaphysical!
Why did all the problems in my linear algebra and diffy-q classes seem so contrived? Why does nothing on the oscilloscope seem to make sense when an op-amp goes nonlinear? How did I make so many decisions in my life so carefully, and still end up hating the outcome? Chaos! It's intrinsic to the system.
I like James Gleick's overview of chaos theory better than any other casual-level science book I've ever read. Usually I hate them. I never mana More...
Why did all the problems in my linear algebra and diffy-q classes seem so contrived? Why does nothing on the oscilloscope seem to make sense when an op-amp goes nonlinear? How did I make so many decisions in my life so carefully, and still end up hating the outcome? Chaos! It's intrinsic to the system.
I like James Gleick's overview of chaos theory better than any other casual-level science book I've ever read. Usually I hate them. I never mana More...
Dec 07, 2008
Zack
rated it:
This is one of my all time favorite books. It changed how I see the world. It solidified some things that I thought somewhere in the back of my mind that I had never found in the world before. It made me feel not alone. Because of it I see chaos everywhere.
I wanted to give it to a close friend once, I couldn't part with mine but I thought my notes and underlines might help her see what I saw, so i went through page by page copying notes and gave her that.
I wanted to give it to a close friend once, I couldn't part with mine but I thought my notes and underlines might help her see what I saw, so i went through page by page copying notes and gave her that.
Aug 12, 2008
Bill
rated it:
This book was recommended by a graduate school classmate in 1989. I didn't understand why, but still read parts of it. It took 15 years to begin to understand: Everything is interconnected. The universe consists of small elements that coalesce into meaningful (to us) "units" - cells, leaves, trees, forests, ... planets, galaxies. A force brings them together; another pushes them apart. Thus, everything is in a state of flux. "Τά πάντα ῥεῖ." ~Ηράκλειτος ("The only c
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Feb 19, 2011
Erin
rated it:
A book that is as much about the people who contributed to the field as the science itself, I found this book highly accessible and incredibly interesting as the field discussed pertains to everything from the pacemaking cells of the heart to the fluctuations in the stock market. Gleick builds on the basics chapter by chapter so difficult concepts are introduced slowly in a way that makes them easy to comprehend in a way my college science profs never did.
Dec 21, 2010
This is a really exciting book. I read a graphic "novel" Introduction to Fractals this August, and the ideas lead me to talk to a mathematician friend, who lent me this book.
The ideas are sometimes well explained, sometimes too obtuse for me (some math, no physics). The attractors chapter is very well done. The book traces the history of the development of the ideas of chaos through many disciplines, principally physics and math. Good diagrams and explication.
The ideas are sometimes well explained, sometimes too obtuse for me (some math, no physics). The attractors chapter is very well done. The book traces the history of the development of the ideas of chaos through many disciplines, principally physics and math. Good diagrams and explication.
Oct 30, 2009
Rebecca
rated it:
This book would have had five stars, but it was written about 12 years ago and so feels a little out of date. It's not a problem for the historical stuff, but for the "current" research with computers, it's painfully obvious that we are way to far in the past. Beyond that though, it was a fascinating book that I could pick up and put down whenever and still be intrigued.
I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone who doesn't enjoy a good pop science book.
I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone who doesn't enjoy a good pop science book.
