DOI

Summary
This book is a mostly modern history of "Chaos'', tracing the ideas some of the most important theorists of this paradoxically holistic view of nature, which unfolds in terms of nonlinear dynamics, including the famous Butterfly Effect of Mitchell Feigenbaum, the fractal concept of Benoit Mandelbrot, which led to a new geometry of nature; and the snappy answer to Einstein by Joseph Ford, who contradicted Einstein’s claim that God does not play dice. Order gives way to chaos, whose deeply complex, disorderly and random stream of dynamics can nevertheless reveal hidden pockets of order within chaotic behavior. And yet not even the moons of Jupiter or Saturn maintain regular orbits, but move like stars do in unruly ellipses. Weather forecasts would be able to trace a path through the infinite states of the atmosphere if only similar starting points could be counted on to lead to similar end-points. Instead, like the fluttering of the butterfly’s wings might trigger a hurricane far away, small differences in starting points can lead to enormous, unpredictable differences in later conditions.
Gleick illustrates the deep connections that these theories have drawn, for example between the fields of chaos and fractal geometry, tying together parallels between the irregular asymmetry of wilderness or of weather turbulence and the rhythms of a human heartbeat, between the structure of snowflakes and the patterns carved in the desert by the wind. And when mathematics encounters nature, no predictions or calculations can be made, and the “laws” of complexity hold universally. The abstract can be understood through unfolding patterns that blossom into disorder, through flow, through shifts in shape, through motion set in motion.

Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
These ideas are now being used in interdisciplinary areas which were once thought to have been separate from physics and mathematics. It has been found, for example that the human body is a complex rhythmic system involving movement and oscillation. Changes in oscillation can create imbalances: there are invisible inner rhythms of the human body which can be correlated to chaos theory. Now some physiologists speak of dynamical diseases: disorders of systems, breakdowns in coordination or control.

Point of Strength
the story line that Gleick develops to introduce us to these chaos theorists as both men and scientists, and to their discoveries and theories, which permeate every area of study and of life itself, giving us a very human glimpse of an abstraction that is difficult to conceive. Chaos is everywhere.