Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity (edit title)

Shelfari edited the description of Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity Friday, August 7 2009.

• Over the past two decades, no field of scientific inquiry has had a more striking impact across a wide array of disciplines–from biology to physics, computing to meteorology–than that known as chaos and complexity, the study of complex systems. Now astrophysicist John Gribbin draws on his expertise to explore, in prose that communicates not only the wonder but the substance of cutting-edge science, the principles behind chaos and complexity. He reveals the remarkable ways these two revolutionary theories have been applied over the last twenty years to explain all sorts of phenomena–from weather patterns to mass extinctions. Grounding these paradigm-shifting ideas in their historical context, Gribbin also traces their development from Newton to Darwin to Lorenz, Prigogine, and Lovelock, demonstrating how–far from overturning all that has gone before–chaos and complexity are the triumphant extensions of simple scientific laws. Ultimately, Gribbin illustrates how chaos and complexity permeate the universe on every scale, governing the evolution of life and galaxies alike.

Shelfari edited the first sentence of Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity Friday, July 17 2009.

• Before the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the world seemed to be ruled by chaos in a quite different way from the way the term is used by scientists today, but in the same way that most people still apply the word.