Chaos

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Lorenz dubbed it the butterfly effect. This means systems like our weather are so sensitive to small disturbances that a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing today could be responsible for a raging storm next month in New York. In science-speak, this is also known as “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” – and it became the cornerstone of the new field of chaos theory. Chaos: Making a new science". Long Range Planning. 22 (5): 152. October 1989. doi: 10.1016/0024-6301(89)90186-6. Rohde, David (21 December 1997). "Plane Crash Kills Son of Best-Selling Author". The New York Times.

An amusing quip on entropy: "Living things manage to remain unstable." Indeed. Increased entropy is the natural progression of the universe. But living things maintain an organized state, which is highly anti-entropic. Hence, we are all unstable people! cd's as a audiobook. A good book with alot of trendy topics that would be of interest to the Wired and Neil Stephenson crowd. Maxwell's Demon,The entropy of information, codes,Goedel, Turing, Babbage, Ada, how new forms of new information technology: printing, the dictionary, telegraph, telephone, television changed things. I found it clearly written, fun and interesting. My interest in chaos theory and butterfly effect has been purely philosophical. I guess the idea of alternate reality always intrigues me. May be fueled by its implication in popular culture, movies, or books. First time, when I read Ray Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder", I was really moved by the idea how something very small might eventually affect something greater at later phases.Devaney, Robert L. (November 1989). "Review of Chaos: Making a New Science". The College Mathematics Journal. 20 (5): 458–459. doi: 10.2307/2686940. ISSN 0746-8342. JSTOR 2686940.

Kendig, Frank (1987-10-15). "Books: Third Scientific Revolution of the Century (Published 1987)". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331 . Retrieved 2020-12-22.

French physician Albert Libchaber teamed up with an engineer for an experiment meant to prove Feigenbaum’s theory of turbulent fluid motion. Libchaber constructed a tiny box that held liquid helium between two metal plates, which he could heat separately. Creating a few millidegrees of difference in temperature between the plates led the helium to start moving. First, as the warm liquid rose and the cool liquid sunk, the helium fluid organized itself into two rolling cylinders. But as Libchaber turned up the temperature, he observed the familiar pattern of period-doubling bifurcations. Animal populations, for example, change in a nonlinear, dynamical way. The subfield of biology that studies how they behave over time is called ecology – and it was one of the first fields to connect its findings to chaos theory. If you graph the history of cotton prices for all the years over the 140+ years of record-keeping, and then graph the prices for any period of time–one year, one decade, one week–during that period, the graphs will display the same pattern!" ـ Mandelbrot I'm sure that for those who are well-versed in information theory, some of his omissions were glaring and seemingly arbitrary, but there is nothing wrong with a book that leaves you wanting more and feeling sufficiently motivated to go out and find it.