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Ubiquity: The Science of History . . . or Why the World Is Simpler Than We Think
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.
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.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2000
199 people are currently reading
2363 people want to read
About the author
Mark Buchanan
7 books58 followersA physicist and author based in Europe writing mostly about science - physics, mathematics, social science and biology.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 66 reviews
December 6, 2021
This book is concise summary of very big ideas both scientific/mathematical and/or evolutionary.
The event which world assumes to be the beginning of First world war, The assassination of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was not even planned. The assassin Gavrilo Princip couldn’t believe his luck when the Driver of the vehicle took the wrong turn and the target was in front of his eyes. This triggered chain of reaction leading to war. Who knows if this hasn’t happened maybe some other even might have triggered the war. The large scale historical rhythms of our world is determined by natural build-up and release of stress in the global network of politics and economics.
Science is the aggregate of all the recipes of that are always successful and rest is literature. There’s no science on earthquakes, forest fires since there are no successful recipes yet. Really big earthquakes aren’t triggered by special events but are natural if infrequent consequence of overall critical organization of the Earth’s crust and its susceptibility to long range chain reaction.
The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory. There’s no philosophy-free science; there’s only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examinations.
To a first approximation; Everything is extinct. The catastrophes which caused mass extinction of species on earth and seas are sporadic and unevenly spread. There 5 major ones which accounts for 95% of the species extinction though in the fabrics it appears stable and slowly changing. 99% of all species are in history are now extinct. But out of these only 35% are extinct died out of mass extinct are rest wiped out in the background gradually. Real killers of species are usually the aftermaths of disaster viz. dust scattering around atmosphere leading to no sunlight or months/years leading to weathering of trees/animals up the good chain.
Singor- Lipp Effect: The fewer fossils you have, the higher the error rate for gauging the timeline of extinction as the fossil which we found may have buried anytime during the timeline of the species and we assume that it’s the time at which species went extinct. Conversely this also applies to committing error on timeline of origination of species.
Interaction between species can trigger evolutionary changes in one another. A population hung up on one fitness peak can make it over to another only by mutating its way through an intervening valley of lower fitness. Complicated problem when looked at the right way, gets more complicated. Basic research is like shooting an arrow into the air and then painting the target on where it lands.
As per Milgram experiment, the letter reached intended recipient when through unknown chain within 6 steps.
Individual free will can coexist with stunning regularity in the activity of a group.
Fractal/power law can be seen in size/population of cities/citing of a paper in other publications/ casualties in war. Viz. for every city with a population of 1 million, there are corresponding 4 cities with half the populations and so on down the line. For every war with some x no. of deaths there are four wars with no. of deaths equals x/2.
Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful. The facts do not speak so someone/historians have to collate/accumulate then and put in a order so it makes sense in some way/sequence whereas they did not make any sense then when they actually happened.
The event which world assumes to be the beginning of First world war, The assassination of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was not even planned. The assassin Gavrilo Princip couldn’t believe his luck when the Driver of the vehicle took the wrong turn and the target was in front of his eyes. This triggered chain of reaction leading to war. Who knows if this hasn’t happened maybe some other even might have triggered the war. The large scale historical rhythms of our world is determined by natural build-up and release of stress in the global network of politics and economics.
Science is the aggregate of all the recipes of that are always successful and rest is literature. There’s no science on earthquakes, forest fires since there are no successful recipes yet. Really big earthquakes aren’t triggered by special events but are natural if infrequent consequence of overall critical organization of the Earth’s crust and its susceptibility to long range chain reaction.
The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory. There’s no philosophy-free science; there’s only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examinations.
To a first approximation; Everything is extinct. The catastrophes which caused mass extinction of species on earth and seas are sporadic and unevenly spread. There 5 major ones which accounts for 95% of the species extinction though in the fabrics it appears stable and slowly changing. 99% of all species are in history are now extinct. But out of these only 35% are extinct died out of mass extinct are rest wiped out in the background gradually. Real killers of species are usually the aftermaths of disaster viz. dust scattering around atmosphere leading to no sunlight or months/years leading to weathering of trees/animals up the good chain.
Singor- Lipp Effect: The fewer fossils you have, the higher the error rate for gauging the timeline of extinction as the fossil which we found may have buried anytime during the timeline of the species and we assume that it’s the time at which species went extinct. Conversely this also applies to committing error on timeline of origination of species.
Interaction between species can trigger evolutionary changes in one another. A population hung up on one fitness peak can make it over to another only by mutating its way through an intervening valley of lower fitness. Complicated problem when looked at the right way, gets more complicated. Basic research is like shooting an arrow into the air and then painting the target on where it lands.
As per Milgram experiment, the letter reached intended recipient when through unknown chain within 6 steps.
Individual free will can coexist with stunning regularity in the activity of a group.
Fractal/power law can be seen in size/population of cities/citing of a paper in other publications/ casualties in war. Viz. for every city with a population of 1 million, there are corresponding 4 cities with half the populations and so on down the line. For every war with some x no. of deaths there are four wars with no. of deaths equals x/2.
Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful. The facts do not speak so someone/historians have to collate/accumulate then and put in a order so it makes sense in some way/sequence whereas they did not make any sense then when they actually happened.
April 3, 2011
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.
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.
November 28, 2017
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 wars, but the book serves as a great introduction and a gentle reminder that the answer is usually somewhere in the middle.
October 24, 2017
A great introduction to complexity and dynamic systems. Enjoyed much more, and was more accessible than Chaos or Complexity.
July 30, 2011
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 in showing the real meaning behind this statistical distribution - not just its utter randomness but also the deeper meaning of the scale-invariance. It rather scarily portrays how so many events that are absolutely great in terms of their consequences rarely have anything more than a normal cause.
That said, the implications of all these statistical functions are always scary - they almost imply that free will does not exist, people do not matter and everything is just a statistical jumble where one can debate the operative function but can do little to alter it or use it for any good purpose.
Overall, a great book although not for those looking for emotive outbursts or explosive conclusions or badly described success formulas.
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 in showing the real meaning behind this statistical distribution - not just its utter randomness but also the deeper meaning of the scale-invariance. It rather scarily portrays how so many events that are absolutely great in terms of their consequences rarely have anything more than a normal cause.
That said, the implications of all these statistical functions are always scary - they almost imply that free will does not exist, people do not matter and everything is just a statistical jumble where one can debate the operative function but can do little to alter it or use it for any good purpose.
Overall, a great book although not for those looking for emotive outbursts or explosive conclusions or badly described success formulas.
July 14, 2019
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”
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”
February 13, 2022
A great book on a fascinating subject. A scientific look at why similar fractal patterns occur in everything from earthquakes to evolution to scientific and political revolutions.
January 6, 2024
Examples of dialectics in multiple fields explained by a physicist.
November 30, 2011
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 overriding metaphor is a sand pile which, surprisingly, physicists have spent much time playing in. And even more surprisingly, they have found that there is no "typical" size of an avalanche in a sand pile--sometimes only a few grains of sand, sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands. The avalanches appear to be completely random.
Yet if this is the case then it is nearly impossible, then, to predict these upheavals. Of course this is akin to chaos theory but he moves beyond early chaos theory to describe power laws which describe the "patterns" of upheavability. These power laws do not allow us to predict one particular event; instead they demonstrate that across many systems both geological and biological there is a correlation between the number of small events (e.g. small earthquakes) and the number of large upheavals (e.g. massive earthquakes).
So while these power laws do not have much practical value at this point, they do, as physics often does, point to an underlying system which is not random yet is also not predictable. Finally he uses these theories to (which will undoubtedly disturb some) history where he argues against the great person or genius theories of history. Of course, as he admits, many historians have already questioned this analysis of history. What Buchanan adds is that nonequalibrium physics is the proper field to describe what will happen--not just in sand piles and earthquakes but in the most complex of human systems.
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 overriding metaphor is a sand pile which, surprisingly, physicists have spent much time playing in. And even more surprisingly, they have found that there is no "typical" size of an avalanche in a sand pile--sometimes only a few grains of sand, sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands. The avalanches appear to be completely random.
Yet if this is the case then it is nearly impossible, then, to predict these upheavals. Of course this is akin to chaos theory but he moves beyond early chaos theory to describe power laws which describe the "patterns" of upheavability. These power laws do not allow us to predict one particular event; instead they demonstrate that across many systems both geological and biological there is a correlation between the number of small events (e.g. small earthquakes) and the number of large upheavals (e.g. massive earthquakes).
So while these power laws do not have much practical value at this point, they do, as physics often does, point to an underlying system which is not random yet is also not predictable. Finally he uses these theories to (which will undoubtedly disturb some) history where he argues against the great person or genius theories of history. Of course, as he admits, many historians have already questioned this analysis of history. What Buchanan adds is that nonequalibrium physics is the proper field to describe what will happen--not just in sand piles and earthquakes but in the most complex of human systems.
February 9, 2013
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 there is generations of accumulated data to pour over.
Finally he discusses system equilibrium and the idea systems always tend towards a stable state. In fact he says most events are because many of these systems are in fact always on the edge of criticality and we have no way of knowing how, why, or what will cause the turning point that will push complicated systems over the edge and cause upheavals.
I will probably read this again. It's a short book and some of the mathematical models didn't make it into my brain clearly. I would recommend this book.
Finally he discusses system equilibrium and the idea systems always tend towards a stable state. In fact he says most events are because many of these systems are in fact always on the edge of criticality and we have no way of knowing how, why, or what will cause the turning point that will push complicated systems over the edge and cause upheavals.
I will probably read this again. It's a short book and some of the mathematical models didn't make it into my brain clearly. I would recommend this book.
November 10, 2015
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 from conventional narrative history is useful advice.
December 18, 2012
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.
June 7, 2020
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 to forests to society, naturally settle into a "critical state" in which a tiny disruption will trigger an event, and that may or may not trigger further events. It's essentially impossible to figure out what will happen because of a given trigger, and conversely, looking back at some event, the particular character of whatever trigger started it generally isn't so important.
This pairs nicely with books such as Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies and The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable.
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 to forests to society, naturally settle into a "critical state" in which a tiny disruption will trigger an event, and that may or may not trigger further events. It's essentially impossible to figure out what will happen because of a given trigger, and conversely, looking back at some event, the particular character of whatever trigger started it generally isn't so important.
This pairs nicely with books such as Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies and The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable.
October 29, 2017
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 concept of the critical state and connects it to the study of history. Buchanan’s style of writing is engaging and approachable and the book tries to tackle a very complex idea in order to cause a paradigm shift.
The final thought that I left with was that human history is fundamentally unpredictable because we operate in a semi-independent state. Generally speaking, our civilizations, societies and cultures appear to follow basic power laws and remain stable, yet individually we display dramatic differences in variability which in turn change many other variables. So we are able to evolve and create new tools and types of societies to attempt to bring about new levels of stability to our systems, yet we still reflect the basic characteristics at the atomic level, as defined by universality and self-organized criticality.
Through a series of examples, Buchanan guides the reader through the history of the concept of the critical state and connects it to the study of history. Buchanan’s style of writing is engaging and approachable and the book tries to tackle a very complex idea in order to cause a paradigm shift.
The final thought that I left with was that human history is fundamentally unpredictable because we operate in a semi-independent state. Generally speaking, our civilizations, societies and cultures appear to follow basic power laws and remain stable, yet individually we display dramatic differences in variability which in turn change many other variables. So we are able to evolve and create new tools and types of societies to attempt to bring about new levels of stability to our systems, yet we still reflect the basic characteristics at the atomic level, as defined by universality and self-organized criticality.
January 11, 2021
Started off strong explaining the fundamentals of power states, some solid examples with evidenced data and introduction to critical states in broad science. The earthquake power state comparison was interesting and both well reasoned and demonstrated. The first half was useful in exploring generalised analysis of broad topics using this lens. Lost enthusiasm in the chapter applying this to economics, frequently comparing states to sand piles became wearisome as the sole application. The final chapters concerning how this possibility might apply to history had a weak bridge, using citations data as proof of power law in the history of ideas was a stretch. The evidence data here was also small and tangential, it felt reductive. I disagreed entirely with the great people argument and the conclusive statements here read like a level of Civilisations instead of the nuanced, data-informed analysis applied to earlier chapter. Enjoyed the first half of the book over all.
December 31, 2025
Ubiquity is a short, sharp read - but one that highlights a the concept of the power law that will have you looking for the patterns in the world around you. I came across this book after hearing that Todd Combs brought it along to his meeting with Charlie Munger (who had in fact already read it). The book investigates the concept of the power law distribution, that is the probability of things is scale invariant (unlike the normal distribution). In short if you double the scale of something subject to a power law, its probability will change by the same scaling factor - at all scales. In fact, such distributions make more sense in a world where we see billionaires, the stock market sees 4-sigma moves every few years. Buchanan does a good job in showing how the power the law has been found in a multitude of fields, so much so that you will be left thinking about how if applies on many other facets of your life.
October 17, 2023
takeaways, in no particular order:
just as chaos: simple rules can cause complex behavior, so does universality: complex systems can obey simple laws
any ordinary action could make extraordinary history
extraordinary events don't need extraordinary causes
power laws are everywhere, and the details don't matter
we can't predict individual events, but we *can* know the context for the system in which they occur (and they probably follow power laws)
there are no "typical" events
network effects, bro
the character of the system, such as its context for change and avalanches, are what causes history
The role (governed by the system itself) is more important than the person who occupies it (governed by chance). Reinforces my prior that Batman wasn't Bruce Wayne, but Bruce Wayne, for a little while, was Batman.
just as chaos: simple rules can cause complex behavior, so does universality: complex systems can obey simple laws
any ordinary action could make extraordinary history
extraordinary events don't need extraordinary causes
power laws are everywhere, and the details don't matter
we can't predict individual events, but we *can* know the context for the system in which they occur (and they probably follow power laws)
there are no "typical" events
network effects, bro
the character of the system, such as its context for change and avalanches, are what causes history
The role (governed by the system itself) is more important than the person who occupies it (governed by chance). Reinforces my prior that Batman wasn't Bruce Wayne, but Bruce Wayne, for a little while, was Batman.
January 22, 2018
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 Recession, K-T extinction). I'm not knowledgeable enough to know what the implications of this are for real people, but it's an interesting insight.
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 Recession, K-T extinction). I'm not knowledgeable enough to know what the implications of this are for real people, but it's an interesting insight.
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May 29, 2021"'The art of being wise,'the American philosopher and psychologist William James once wrote, 'is the art of knowing what to overlook,' and this book is about a terrific step along the scientific road of learning what to overlook. It is about the discovery of a profound similarity not between triangles or moving objects, but between the upheavals that affect our lives, and the ways in which the complicated networks in which they occur—economies, political systems, ecosystems, and so on—are naturally organized. We might add to our list dramatic changes in fashion or musical taste, episodes of social unrest, technological change, even great scientific revolutions."
February 11, 2026
This book introduced Self-Organized Criticality (SOC). It's a very practical model that's underappreciated by the public. It described the process of "slow pressure build-up and the fast release." This process is ubiquitous; It manifests in mysterious phenomena, including
- Stock market crash
- Forest fires
- Earthquakes
- Extinctions
- Scientific revolutions
- Social upheavals and wars
It's immensely useful. However, it only describes and explains partial features of the financial market. For example, it can't explain the gradual and long meltdown that brings asset prices to zero. The market is more complicated than SOC.
- Stock market crash
- Forest fires
- Earthquakes
- Extinctions
- Scientific revolutions
- Social upheavals and wars
It's immensely useful. However, it only describes and explains partial features of the financial market. For example, it can't explain the gradual and long meltdown that brings asset prices to zero. The market is more complicated than SOC.
December 3, 2022
Really interesting read! Buchanan talks about the tension between the facts that human history is a product of vast social forces and that vast social forces are made up of a sea of individual forces. How can we begin to understand why certain catastrophic events occur throughout human history? Well apparently it’s through the complexity theory. Already thinking of ways to use this in the classroom.
August 10, 2017
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 become that advanced.
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 become that advanced.
November 2, 2017
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.
December 18, 2017
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.
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.
November 9, 2020
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 :)
May 28, 2023
A book about power laws and where they’re found. The book gives interesting examples but feels to stretch the boundaries of its relationships. At the same time it leaves one to question the causation of the distribution and it’s ubiquity in randomness.
May 14, 2024
Surprisingly fun work on theoretical physics looking at critical states, power laws and how they impact the world around us. Best bit for me was on evolution / fitness, gave me a helpful lens for looking at business resilience to shocks.
November 25, 2017
Wow. Really interesting!
December 17, 2017
Enjoyable book, the concepts did get repeated in every chapter
February 24, 2018
really interesting theory. well thought out.
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