Sanestorm book reviews

“Chaos"

by James Gleick

If you don’t think that chaos theory has anything to do with marketing, you haven’t read this highly engaging, often entertaining, surprising and accessible volume. Gleick takes examples from the animal kingdom, meteorology, cartography and modern life to show how seemingly random events and systems actually conform to patterns at the heart of our universe.

• Your washing machine hums along nicely, week after week. One day, it starts to make a weird, semi-regular, “wubbida-wubbida-wonk” noise. Frustrated and impatient, you give it a good kick... and the noise stops, the machine returns to normal operation, and you shrug and separate your next load.
• Water moves smoothly through a pipe at a set pressure. At twice that pressure, twice as much water moves through. At three times, three times as much. But when you turn the pressure up to 3.5 times the original, the water stops flowing smoothly, seems to “bunch up” in the pipe and your throughput is actually less than at your original pressure.
• Several different almanacs differ in their report on the length of England’s coastline.
• The human heart, when suffering from an abnormal and harmful rhythm can be set back to normal by a large electric shock.
• You’re driving down the highway at 65 mph, along with three other lanes of traffic. All of a sudden, traffic slows to a near crawl. You figure there must be an accident up ahead. Nope. After 10 minutes of driving at 5mph, traffic picks back up and resumes its fast pace.

What do these situations have in common? They all evidence chaotic behavior patterns. And if “chaos” and “pattern” don’t seem to go together in your world view, they will after your read Gleick’s work.

For hundreds of years, scientists have thought that there are essentially two ways that a system can behave; logically, based on a formula, or randomly, based entirely on chance. Chaos theory proposes a third situation; systems can behave based on a pattern that is not amenable to standard mathematical formulation.

Gleick’s book traces the roots of chaos theory back to their beginnings in several disparate scientific disciplines. One of the reasons that chaos theory is a relatively new field of study, is that some of the most startling evidence of pattern similarity requires coma prisons from different sciences. Once computing began to make the mapping and plotting of complex patterns possible (and more affordable), scientists from different fields began to notice strange similarities in graphs of such seemingly separate phenomenon as weather, geology, mating cycles and disease propagation. When these chaos pioneers compared notes, they began to suspect that a single, underlying theory might help explain all their weirdly related data.

James Gleick is one the most accessible science writers in America today. He never “speaks down” to his audience, but he carefully presents material in a way that helps readers understand some fairly complicated stuff.

No matter what business you are in, you will never look at patterns and “randomness” the same way again. Which won’t make sitting in rush hour traffic any more fun.

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