Everyday Chaos: The Mathematics of Unpredictability, from the Weather to the Stock Market

by Brian Clegg

Chaos and complexity explained, with illuminating examples ranging from unpredictable pendulums to London's wobbly Millennium Bridge.The math we are taught in school is precise and only deals with simple situations. Reality is far more complex. Trying to understand a system with multiple interacting components--the weather, for example, or the human body, or the stock market--means dealing with two factors: chaos and complexity. If we don't understand these two essential subjects, we can't understand the real world. In Everyday Chaos, Brian Clegg explains chaos and complexity for the general reader, with an accessible, engaging text and striking full-color illustrations.

By chaos, Clegg means a system where complex interactions make predicting long-term outcomes nearly impossible; complexity means complex interacting systems that have new emergent properties that make them more than the sum of their parts. Clegg illustrates these phenomena with discussions of predictable randomness, the power of probability, and the behavior of pendulums. He describes what Newton got wrong about gravity; how feedback kept steam engines from exploding; and why weather produces chaos. He considers the stock market, politics, bestseller lists, big data, and London's wobbling Millennium Bridge as examples of chaotic systems, and he explains how a better understanding of chaos helps scientists predict more accurately the risk of catastrophic Earth-asteroid collisions. We learn that our brains are complex, self-organizing systems; that the structure of snowflakes exemplifies emergence; and that life itself has been shown to be an emergent property of a complex system.

Genres: Science, Mathematics, Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

Published October 6, 2020

About the author

Brian's latest books, Ten Billion Tomorrows and How Many Moons does the Earth Have are now available to pre-order. He has written a range of other science titles, including the bestselling Inflight Science, The God Effect, Before the Big Bang, A Brief History of Infinity, Build Your Own Time Machine and Dice World.

Along with appearances at the Royal Institution in London he has spoken at venues from Oxford and Cambridge Universities to Cheltenham Festival of Science, has contributed to radio and TV programmes, and is a popular speaker at schools. Brian is also editor of the successful www.popularscience.co.uk book review site and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Brian has Masters degrees from Cambridge University in Natural Sciences and from Lancaster University in Operational Research, a discipline originally developed during the Second World War to apply the power of mathematics to warfare. It has since been widely applied to problem solving and decision making in business.

Brian has also written regular columns, features and reviews for numerous publications, including Nature, The Guardian, PC Week, Computer Weekly, Personal Computer World, The Observer, Innovative Leader, Professional Manager, BBC History, Good Housekeeping and House Beautiful. His books have been translated into many languages, including German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, Turkish, Norwegian, Thai and even Indonesian.

Reviews

[Lekini · Rating 5 out of 5]

Que buen libro para la gente que quiere aprender sobre la Teoría del Caos. Brian Clegg explica increíblemente bien y se entiende todo a la perfección. La única pega que le podría poner al libro es el capítulo del dominio del caos, que no te habla de como controlar/predecir/ect (normal por la propia definición de Caos) pero te lo vende como que si. Aún así un libro súper recomendado si te interesa el tema.

[Nick C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyday Chaos is a quick read that will leave you with an acute awareness of the complex and chaotic systems we encounter in everyday life. This is an incredibly accessible and humbling book that puts the complexity of life into perspective. I have a new appreciation of our unpredictable world and I’m comforted to have a better understanding of the theories that help us navigate the chaos.

[RAD · Rating 4 out of 5]

!=WYSIWYG *

Book titles are important: like the lead to a good news story, they frame the subject matter, set the tone, and manage reader expectations. Many books fail this simple criteria. Brian Clegg’s Everyday Chaos does so partially: while the main title is apt, the subtitle (“The Mathematics of Unpredictability, from the Weather to the Stock Market”) is not. There are no mathematical formulas, or any real mathematical discussions. There are, however, lots of illustrations, and this contributes to the book’s success.

I recently purchased this book at Boulder Book Store on a recent trip to Boulder, Colorado. I was drawn to the title, cover art, and publisher (I prefer academic presses for nonfiction). However, the book was shrink-wrapped, so I was unable to peruse the table of contents. I can now say that a better title would have been Everyday Chaos: An Illustrated History.

But this is a minor criticism. Everyday Chaos is a fun read for the lay science reader. With its glossy pages and numerous color illustrations, it feels like a greatly expanded version of a World Book Encyclopedia article—and I mean that as a compliment. (As Somerset Maugham said, “To write simply is as difficult as to be good;” this is another area where books frequently fail).

Chaos is comprised of seven sections, each with a half-dozen or so subcategories just a few pages in length. Copious illustrations are scattered throughout, some spanning two pages. The dramatis personae (Newton, Laplace, Lorenz, Mandelbrot, et al.) are well known, as are the many subtopics (fractals, attractors, weather, emergence, and the seemingly requisite reference to marmorkrebs). While many of the topics and examples are present in other works (where they are also explicated more formally), Clegg does a great job organizing and presenting the subject.

MIT Press has its Essential Knowledge Series, and Oxford University Press its Very Short Introductions series, both of which offer excellent overviews and have academic characteristics such as endnotes and bibliographies. This volume, also by MIT Press, lacks notes and a bibliography, but could occupy a different overview niche, were it to become part of its own series.

Chaos is frequently defined as a system that produces unpredictable outcomes from tiny changes in initial conditions. Viewed through this interpretive lens, perhaps Clegg’s (and his editor’s) subtitle is intentional, playfully illustrating how a simple title can morph into something different. At first loaded, heavy, and academic, Everyday Chaos shifts into something lighter and more accessible, but not shallow. A worthwhile read for the nonspecialist.

* The '!=" operator means "not" in python.

[Tao Li · Rating 3 out of 5]

For people with a bit math backgrounds, the book is too shallow and there is not many equations around. Even though this not a textbook on chaos, I still would like to see some math, since this is what this book is about. I really hope the author could add an appendix illustrating the chaotic things more mathematically in the future edition so that next time when my friends ask me about chaos, I can say something more than examples.

[Yates Buckley · Rating 5 out of 5]

An overview of the field of scientific “chaos” and its connected stories. The book is moslty accessible and covers material that is infrequently covered in popular science texts with beautiful pictures.

I enjoyed the connections the author finds between fields that initially are not as apparent. It leads to a broader intuition about what is real, life and cognition.

[Laira]

really interesting! and it helped me with my physics test <3

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

solid math book. nothing crazy except the math itself. beautiful use of images. fun to write notes in

I wish it had gone a bit more into technical depth, maybe in appendices

[Cam Larsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, some samples were a little dry but overall it really make you wonder about the systems of chaos and complexity. While wondering about the systems, you're made aware that your perceived idea of how some of them should work is not comparable to reality; where in reality small (sometimes unseen) changes in the beginning can greatly affect the overall outcome. A true journey of wonderment where how things "should" act isn't always how they do act.

[James Quincy · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting overview of the concept of chaos and complex systems applied to real world examples, some more out there than others. The chapter at the end with the brief discussion of consciousness and artificial intelligence was a favourite part for me. I only wish the book went into more detail about the math behind all of these ideas, especially with the Mandelbrot sets and the chaotic logistic growth model.

[Javier Espasa Labrador · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una puerta a los conceptos del caos y la complejidad de una forma sencilla y amena para los que empezamos a leer del tema. Me ha gustado mucho.