Thursday, July 5, 2007
Chaos, the Making of a New Science
In case you can't tell, I'm reading a lot of pop-science right now. Chaos, the Making of a New Science was humbling backfill.
In the mid-eighties, I suppose there was good reason to be optimistic that Chaos (TM) was going to solve a bunch of mysteries of the universe. And now, two decades later, it probably has. But none of them were the mysteries we were hoping for.
Random walks are still random. Strange attractors are still strange.
Which actually brings me to my big point about this book. I read it at the same time as Douglas Hofstadter's new book, and the two seem to have their own strange, loopy attractor, which is the word strange in the way they use it.
I like the word strange. The words "random", "chaos", "simple", "complex", and their friends have always bothered me. And for the record, Hofstadter says in his end-notes that I'm allowed to put the comma outside the quote marks in that last sentence, so la-di-frikkin-da, in the words of that immortal genius Chris Farley.
Strange (in terms of attractors, loops, quarks, etc.) means something particular, which is best described verbally by the word "strange" before them.
But on to the point that makes the book humbling.
Chaos theory was supposed to be awesome-er than it turned out to be. And we should all take that as a moral lesson when we're trying to figure out how awesome some New Kind of Science is. If you catch my drift.
Anyhow, good book, worth the three days and the fifteen bucks. I give it an arbitrary nine out of an arbitrary thirteen.
In the mid-eighties, I suppose there was good reason to be optimistic that Chaos (TM) was going to solve a bunch of mysteries of the universe. And now, two decades later, it probably has. But none of them were the mysteries we were hoping for.
Random walks are still random. Strange attractors are still strange.
Which actually brings me to my big point about this book. I read it at the same time as Douglas Hofstadter's new book, and the two seem to have their own strange, loopy attractor, which is the word strange in the way they use it.
I like the word strange. The words "random", "chaos", "simple", "complex", and their friends have always bothered me. And for the record, Hofstadter says in his end-notes that I'm allowed to put the comma outside the quote marks in that last sentence, so la-di-frikkin-da, in the words of that immortal genius Chris Farley.
Strange (in terms of attractors, loops, quarks, etc.) means something particular, which is best described verbally by the word "strange" before them.
But on to the point that makes the book humbling.
Chaos theory was supposed to be awesome-er than it turned out to be. And we should all take that as a moral lesson when we're trying to figure out how awesome some New Kind of Science is. If you catch my drift.
Anyhow, good book, worth the three days and the fifteen bucks. I give it an arbitrary nine out of an arbitrary thirteen.
// posted by David @ 2:18 PM 
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