In the Wake of Chaos: Unpredictable Order in Dynamical Systems

ANNOTATION

Clear, concise, and accessible to the nonspecialist, In the Wake of Chaos explains the profound challenge of chaos theory to the traditional concepts of science: law, predictability, understanding, and control. Where traditional science is concerned with discrete facts and events, and with rigorous theories of why things happen, in chaos the emphasis is on patterns, behaviors, and models of how things happen. The central insight of chaos theory--that systems governed by mathematically simple equations can exhibit elaborate, even unpredictable behavior--is explored in lucid detail. But Kellert provides something more than a superb introduction to chaos theory: he shows what happens when effective marketing meets the practice of science. This book is a brilliant case study in the coming of age of a new science. Index included. One table, 14 line drawings.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

We are in the wake of chaos - trying to make sense of the news that the universe is a far more unpredictable place than anyone ever imagined. What began with the discovery of randomness in simple physical systems - a curl of smoke, a tumble of water - has exploded into a fascination with "chaotic" models of everything from brainwaves to business cycles. Why has chaos captured so much attention? What does it do to our basic beliefs about knowledge, meaning, and our place in a suddenly turbulent world? In this provocative book, Stephen Kellert takes the first sustained look at the broad intellectual implications of chaos. Like quantum mechanics and relativity before it, chaos has an irresistible appeal as a radical new vision of reality. But how solid are its claims? Has chaos been oversold? How far can the science of chaos take us? These are just some of the intriguing questions Kellert sets out to answer. Kellert describes the challenge of chaos to traditional science - from its power to thwart the search for universal laws to its unsettling effect on such essential concepts as fact and event, cause and control. And he paints a suggestive portrait of what knowledge - with science as its source - might have to be in order to account for the profoundly counterintuitive findings of chaos. This is also the story of the coming of age of a new science. Chaotic phenomena have been observed for ages, but only recently have scientists begun to study chaos systematically. Kellert points to the deep biases for order and control that have kept the study of chaos in the background. In today's culture, however, chaos flourishes as a powerful organizing principle for those seeking to expand the boundaries of the knowable and redefine what we mean by legitimate knowledge itself. Revealing glimpses of beauty and diversity in the most routine phenomena, of order within apparent disorder, chaos is neither the new toy of media-savvy scientists and their followers nor the mystical

FROM THE CRITICS

Booknews