Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.

Start by marking “Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen” as Want to Read:

Other editions

Enlarge cover

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Open Preview

Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

Mark Buchanan

3.89 · Rating details · 555 ratings · 56 reviews

Why do catastrophes happen? What sets off earthquakes, for example? What about mass extinctions of species? The outbreak of major wars? Massive traffic jams that seem to appear out of nowhere? Why does the stock market periodically suffer dramatic crashes? Why do some forest fires become superheated infernos that rage totally out of control?

Experts have never been able to Why do catastrophes happen? What sets off earthquakes, for example? What about mass extinctions of species? The outbreak of major wars? Massive traffic jams that seem to appear out of nowhere? Why does the stock market periodically suffer dramatic crashes? Why do some forest fires become superheated infernos that rage totally out of control?

Experts have never been able to explain the causes of any of these disasters. Now scientists have discovered that these seemingly unrelated cataclysms, both natural and human, almost certainly all happen for one fundamental reason. More than that, there is not and never will be any way to predict them.

Critically acclaimed science journalist Mark Buchanan tells the fascinating story of the discovery that there is a natural structure of instability woven into the fabric of our world. From humble beginnings studying the physics of sandpiles, scientists have learned that an astonishing range of things–Earth’s crust, cars on a highway, the market for stocks, and the tightly woven networks of human society–have a natural tendency to organize themselves into what’s called the “critical state,” in which they are poised on what Buchanan describes as the “knife-edge of instability.” The more places scientists have looked for the critical state, the more places they’ve found it, and some believe that the pervasiveness of instability must now be seen as a fundamental feature of our world.

Ubiquity is packed with stories of real-life catastrophes, such as the huge earthquake that in 1995 hit Kobe, Japan, killing 5,000 people; the forest fires that ravaged Yellowstone National Park in 1988; the stock market crash of 1987; the mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs; and the outbreak of World War I. Combining literary flair with scientific rigor, Buchanan introduces the researchers who have pieced together the evidence of the critical state, explaining their ingenious work and unexpected insights in beautifully lucid prose.

At the dawn of this new century, Buchanan reveals, we are witnessing the emergence of an extraordinarily powerful new field of science that will help us comprehend the bewildering and unruly rhythms that dominate our lives and may even lead to a true science of the dynamics of human culture and history.

From the Hardcover edition. ...more

Get A Copy

Paperback, 288 pages

Published November 5th 2002 by Broadway Books (first published 2000)

More Details... Edit Details

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Reader Q&A

To ask other readers questions about Ubiquity, please sign up.

Be the first to ask a question about Ubiquity

Lists with This Book

Reality is Not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli

Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers by Robert M. Sapolsky

Farnam Street - The Books I’ve Read in 2017

91 books — 12 voters

More lists with this book...

Community Reviews

Showing 1-30

Average rating 3.89 ·

Rating details

· 555 ratings · 56 reviews

More filters

Sort order

Start your review of Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

Mar 12, 2011 Andrew Skretvedt rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Writing having read this a while ago...so don't read this too closely, as I'm really just free-form riffing off vague recollections of the book. (I just want to get it in my list here, for future reference.)

If you enjoy history and economic ideas, as well as basic science, then this book is worth a check-out. If you've enjoyed books like "Freakonomics", then you'll probably find fun nuggets of value in this book as well. The book's main theme is something best to take away and carry with you in Writing having read this a while ago...so don't read this too closely, as I'm really just free-form riffing off vague recollections of the book. (I just want to get it in my list here, for future reference.)

If you enjoy history and economic ideas, as well as basic science, then this book is worth a check-out. If you've enjoyed books like "Freakonomics", then you'll probably find fun nuggets of value in this book as well. The book's main theme is something best to take away and carry with you in the back of your mind as you analyze and filter life's events unfolding around you. It may affect how you approach certain situations, or inspire a new angle for attacking a problem you might be faced with.

The notion of self-organized criticality perfuses the whole book, and lends a unique and captivating perspective on the situations and problems presented. I think this could be very useful for understanding why some problems we face are hard and seem to defy solution.

However, with this comes the realization that many more things which we try to manage and predict may in fact be more like the weather, where predictability is strictly limited to expressions of probability that are reliable only on relatively short timescales.

I'm skeptical about some of the specifics which the author applies to some of the situations he describes. I couldn't shake the feeling that there was some basis left lacking or insufficiently substantiated. That may mean that his own understanding of critical state theory may be incomplete or misapplied.

Still, with a wary eye I can provisionally accept his ideas at the very least as a perspective worthy of investigation. It may be that he's right, or correct enough to warrant really changing our attitudes toward managing and governing certain aspects of life.

If anyone's experience of events and situations sets itself up like a pile of sand grains, growing more unstable with each additional grain, then perhaps the best way to govern is not to focus so much on inflexible rules and structures, but to aim for light-touch policies that reduce the "friction" of life...so that the sand has less chance to pile up to a dangerous height, and tends to flow out more readily like a fluid. ...more

flag 4 likes · Like · see review

Nov 28, 2017 Nehal Singh rated it really liked it

Intriguing concepts that usually exist in the boundaries of our own instincts - why do things happen the way they do? People tend to take extreme viewpoints - either everything happens for a reason or things happen completely randomly. The author takes a measured, scientific approach and does an admirable job of avoiding bias and jumping to conclusions. Interesting concepts and brilliantly written. I feel he could've gone a little deeper into a part of history instead of general statements about ...more

flag 4 likes · Like · see review

Oct 24, 2017 Mikedariano rated it it was amazing

A great introduction to complexity and dynamic systems. Enjoyed much more, and was more accessible than Chaos or Complexity.

flag 4 likes · Like · see review

Jul 14, 2019 Dennis Littrell rated it liked it · review of another edition

The real ubiquity is complexity itself

Let's begin with a counter-thesis, namely that the "ubiquity" found in simplistic computer models ("games") which are then related to real world systems such as earthquakes, sandpiles, the stock market, political and social history, etc., may be an artificiality and a whole lot less significant than Buchanan supposes.

The fact that the games are, as Buchanan reports, tinkered with so that they yield a "power law" similar to that found in natural phenomena re The real ubiquity is complexity itself

Let's begin with a counter-thesis, namely that the "ubiquity" found in simplistic computer models ("games") which are then related to real world systems such as earthquakes, sandpiles, the stock market, political and social history, etc., may be an artificiality and a whole lot less significant than Buchanan supposes.

The fact that the games are, as Buchanan reports, tinkered with so that they yield a "power law" similar to that found in natural phenomena reveals the artificiality. What this "power law" really amounts to is something like "the frequency of a big change is at least two times and maybe four times (or more) less than the frequency of a small change." The "power" in the "power law" is nothing more than an exponent, as in something-squared, or something-cubed, etc. It's simply a power of a number as a measure of difference. Now, if the differences fell exactly on two times or four times, etc., then perhaps there would be some great significance. But when something is 2.14 times less likely (as it is when the avalanche is doubled in the sandpile game [p. 45, p. 57]) or 1.19 times less likely (as it is for magnets pointing in the same direction in the Onsager and Kaufman experiment [p. 129]) then calling the differences an example of a "power law" at work seems a bit forced and, at any rate, trivial.

Incidentally, the word "history" as used in this book refers to a past that is different than now in a way that cannot be exhaustively unraveled. This idea comes from complexity theory and owes something to information theory. Buchanan attempts to apply it to a wide variety of phenomenon with varying degrees of success.

But what is really being asserted here is the mundane fact that a big change is less likely than a small change in a complex system near the edge of chaos. Such systems: forests, the geological earth, the stock market, the international political arena, etc., are seen as having "self-organized criticality," and it is this sort of complexity that they have in common, and this is what is significant, not some artificially derived "power law."

Another key idea in the book is that the immediate "cause" of a big event in such systems is no different (or so it seems to our discernment) than the cause of a small event. This is an idea from complexity theory, and an exciting one. What it means is that such systems are in principle impossible to predict. In the sandpile game, for example, we don't know when we drop the latest grain whether it will trigger a big avalanche or a small one or none at all. This is similar to the "butterfly effect" in complexity theory in which it is thought possible that the flap of a butterfly's wings in the Sahara Desert, for example, may affect the amount of rain that falls on Cuba.

Where I think Buchanan goes astray here is in making unwarranted connections between systems by using superficial and forced similarities. For example, one of the ideas from the study of earthquakes is that there is no typical size for an earthquake. In his desire to generalize Buchanan tries to find the same sort of phenomena in the interesting study Sidney Redner did on the fate of scientific research papers. Buchanan writes on page 200 that there was "no typical number of citations for a paper, and, by extension, no typical magnitude for the reshaping in the network of ideas that any paper ultimately entails." However on the previous page Buchanan has already reported that there was indeed "a typical size." That size was zero. Of the 783,339 papers published, 368,110 had no citations at all.

Buchanan also asserts on page 169 "...there is no size for a city in the United States or elsewhere, and no reason to see special historical or geographical situations behind the emergence of the very biggest." I agree there is no typical size for a city, but to ignore the effect of rivers, lakes and protected harbors as well as other factors such as nearby mineral and other resources in the growth of cities is silly. Chicago, for example, is a big city not by happenstance but because of its location on a great lake and because of its proximity to the middle of a great, growing country. Similar arguments can be made about other great cities in the US and around the world. The historical and geographical circumstances are special and they really are crucial.

Buchanan further extends the thesis to include social and political revolutions. This makes for lively reading and there is no doubt that there are similarities between the critical state of a nation before a revolution and that of a sandpile before an avalanche or a forest before a fire, but the stresses are of an entirely different sort. He sees the readjustments of governments as a way to prevent the maladjustments that lead to revolutions as similar to the small forest fires that forest managers start to prevent a large forest fire as similar. (p. 209) Whether these similarities are more than conceptional analogies is another matter. Buchanan himself notes, still on page 209, "None of this is meant to be fully convincing." And on page 230, when seeing similarities between the "behaviors of the mass of humanity" and the "wild fluctuations of the magnet poised between its...phases," Buchanan adds, "It goes without saying that nothing I have mentioned in the past few chapters proves this. The message is simply that this is a real possibility." I agree, and I think these statements really could apply to the entire book.

In conclusion, I disagree with the notion that the world is simpler than we think. I believe the opposite is manifestly true, and I found nothing in Buchanan's very interesting arguments to prove otherwise.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Jul 29, 2011 Nilesh rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

So much better than Black Swan. The topic is similar to a degree although without personal hubris or any obsession to limit the discussion to financial markets or any vendetta against another equally useful Gaussian function as was the case with the other much more popular book.

The implications of otherwise simple power law are well laid out. The book lucidly shows how pervasive power law distributions are in natural life and human interactions. More importantly, the book wonderfully succeeds i ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Jan 27, 2020 Bryan Alkire rated it it was ok

Dated and not particularly excited. The idea of complexity has become a bit cliched as a hot topic. This book was at the beginning and it’s nearly 20 years old. The book does move along with chapters on various topics of randomness in data. The writing is not exciting or novel…in fact, it’s repetitive repeating the same mantra in every chapter…everything is random, nothing can be predicted except mathematical relationships which don’t help with causal prediction. The analysis seems sound, though ...more

flag 2 likes · Like · see review

Feb 09, 2013 Sam Bennett rated it liked it · review of another edition

An interesting book along the lines of Blink, Tipping Point. Using several global examples, Buchanan tries to show there is no way to predict future events, earthquakes, market crashes, etc. When we imply we know how major events like these happened, it is always in hindsight. In particular I liked his example using economists predictions. There was NO case where any economist predicted any of the events we have been through. Economics is a particularly good example of his methodology since ther ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Oct 28, 2015 Anil rated it really liked it

If the author had included a chapter with one example, with exact step by step procedures about how these power laws were calculated, the book would've been perfect. Nevertheless, amazing book. Methods are interesting and can be googled. While I have always used the Petri dish as an analogy for human societies, I was pleased to find out that the spread and scaling of human settlements followed the same patterns as forms of bacterial growth. The message that we should not try to learn lessons fro ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Dec 18, 2012 James Morrison rated it really liked it

I liked it very much. It made me skeptical about some of the science I learned when I was young. Mostly, not everything is normally distributed like you might think. Science class, at least in the past, studied things we understand and when the relationship is not linear, or we don't understand the pattern it tends to be ignored. So this is a nice science lesson from a different perspective than you may have considered. ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Feb 26, 2019 john prest rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Obvious!

The title should be "Things happen because a lot of other things happened in the past". Several examples of ultimately the same effect. Could have written it in 60 pages. Nothing actionable. ...more

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Oct 15, 2017 Rohit rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Things I learnt
- hammer and nail symptoms
- understood bits and pieces of critical states
- know when to fold a book

flag 1 like · Like · see review

Jun 07, 2020 Dan Drake rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

One of those books that makes you look at the world in an entirely new way.

Everything from earthquakes to the stock market to the current protests about the killing of George Floyd. Why do you sometimes get a "big" event -- a catastrophic earthquake, fire, worldwide protest movement, and sometimes such things are no big deal? Amazingly, it all can be explained and understood with very simple physical models. And the difference? There is no difference; all of these systems, from the earth's crust ...more

flag Like · see review

Oct 29, 2017 Vinny rated it really liked it

This is a phenomenal book for students of history to understand how the concept of universality in physics relates to the field. Universality simply states that under very broad conditions, interacting objects display universal features of their behavior. Furthermore, it appears that systems generally tend to move into a self-organized critical state on their own, which could result in a catastrophic event.

Through a series of examples, Buchanan guides the reader through the history of the concep ...more

flag Like · see review

Jan 22, 2018 Steve rated it it was amazing

Shelves: read-again, nonfiction

A fascinating and, I think, very important book. As part of an unofficial trilogy with Evolution of Everything and Deep Simplicity, prepare for a consciousness-expanding experience.

To brutally over-simplify, the thesis seems to be that in a networked, far-from-equilibrium, non-linear world (such as ours), many interesting and important phenomena from earthquakes to consciousness are described by chaos and a power law. Thus, you can expect but never predict large events (Fukushima, Great Recessio ...more

flag Like · see review

Aug 07, 2017 Justin Mundt rated it really liked it

Shelves: own-it

This is a great overview of complexity theory from the vantage point of physics.

The idea I can't shake is that wars follow a power distribution and we are likely to have infrequent but inevitable large scale wars. These wars will continue until one is so large that it wipes humanity out. Maybe we really do need to colonize other planets for the survival of our species. It would explain why we haven't seen any type 2 or type 3 civilizations. Perhaps they always wipe themselves out before they can ...more

flag Like · see review

Nov 01, 2017 Bill rated it really liked it

Fascinating book. One of my takeaways is that critical states are a useful alternative way to view and evaluate the world and our place in it. The "sand pile game" is a super helpful model to apply to different aspects of the world. Importantly, it de-emphasizes our natural tendency to try and explain every cause to an event after the fact. ...more

flag Like · see review

Dec 18, 2017 Philip Holman rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Deep philosophical treatise of events commonly perceived as having superficial causes

I found this gem a very interesting take on major events having similar underlying structures which simplistically are all disasters waiting to happen. Not so sure on the distribution of wealth whereby a top heavy US distribution is not shared to this extreme by other 1st world countries.

flag Like · see review

Nov 09, 2020 ArthurPrates rated it really liked it

The concepts presented in the book are quite intriguing and interesting. The main message of "history matters" is quite powerful. The book starts repeating itself in the last 100 pages, but still is a good book and I recommend :) ...more

flag Like · see review

Nov 24, 2017 Jim rated it it was amazing

Wow. Really interesting!

flag Like · see review

Dec 02, 2017 Aliasger Talib rated it really liked it

Enjoyable book, the concepts did get repeated in every chapter

flag Like · see review

Feb 18, 2018 Joel rated it really liked it · review of another edition

really interesting theory. well thought out.

flag Like · see review

Mar 17, 2018 Malte rated it it was ok

Sadly, it became repetitive and boring to me. In the end, I did not find the argument that human history behaves like forest fires or earthquakes very convincing.

flag Like · see review

Jun 18, 2018 Philip Chaston rated it liked it

Slightly old now but the revelation that such structures could affect human society was neither illuminating nor revelatory. As a research programme, there's been no lift-off since. ...more

flag Like · see review

Aug 06, 2018 Patti rated it really liked it

Interesting blend of science and history. Thought provoking.

flag Like · see review

Jan 26, 2020 Chandrasen Rajashekar marked it as to-read

Shelves: not-purchased, psychology, science

Popular science book that summarizes the research in complex systems. Page 267 second paragraph in the book The Black Swan

flag Like · see review

Jul 03, 2020 Amy rated it it was ok

Dated and repetitive.

flag Like · see review

Sep 22, 2020 Holly Dolezalek rated it it was amazing

What a fascinating and actually readable explanation of the power law and the simplicity that underlies certain complexity. Couldn't recommend this more highly. ...more

flag Like · see review

Jan 19, 2019 Dan Landgraf rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Interesting read

Very engaging and interesting read. Not overly dense, but the author does not shy away from complex physics topics. Great book for all interest levels

flag Like · see review

Nov 19, 2011 Ron Christiansen rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: science, physics, nf

Physics all around--also watching the three part Nova series with youngest son about the fabric of the cosmos.

I'm most intrigued by Buchanan's discussion of instability, that many systems build up pressure of some sort and exist on what he calls the knife of instability. This critical state lends itself to occasional upheavals (an earthquake, massive extinctions, a war) with one small shift in the system. That is big events do not have big causes--how marvelously counterintuitive. His overridin ...more

flag Like · see review

Jul 07, 2013 Collin Clark rated it really liked it

Interesting book on historical science and how one seemingly small event can lay the ground work for future events. Think of the hypothetical situation where a butterfly flaps its wings in Africa leads to a hurricane in the US. The book discusses how complex things ranging from earthquakes, to financial markets, to political revolutions lie precariously in a "critical state" where at any moment one small event can lead to a major catastrophe without a way for us to predict it with certainty. Sci ...more

flag Like · see review

« previous 1 2 next »