David's Blague

Man, I wanted to like this book.

It did have its good points. It touches on a lot of interesting topics (from fireflies to Bosons). It provides a picture what's it's like to the author's kind of research- both good and bad. And it does provide a lot of jumping-off points for further reading, whether it be cybernetics, catastrophe, chaos, complexity, or other fads that start with "c".

Cellular automata, anyone?

The worst symptom of what I didn't like is on page 166: "The human brain cannot readily visualize more than three dimensions..." When something is beyond the abilities of the author's imagined audience, he resorts to metaphor and analogy. And this book contains a great deal of metaphor.

Which is to say that my main criticism is that I don't think Strogatz is a very good writer. I imagine he's a brilliant mathematician, but every time he starts an analogy, rather than clarify the topic for me, it further muddies the waters.

Okay, that last use of metaphor tried to be situational comedy, but failed.

My more substantive criticism is that Strogatz never manages to tell us what "sync" is. He points at a lot of phenomena and calls them sync, but never really leaves us with a visceral understanding of what lands them in that category. Other than the fact that some things seem to happen at the same time. Then he ends the book by telling us sync is "uniquely successful," calls it "a crucial first step," and then ultimately says he'll write more when we have a "major breakthrough in understanding."

He also takes a pot-shot that annoys me: "Others conceive the universe to be a giant computer, running a cryptic program whose discovery would constitute the end of science."

Oh, come on.

Before I leave this promised review on that sour note, I would like to give it a non-arbitrary 338 out of 641 stars. The book has 338 pages in hardcover, and 641 is Douglas Hofstadter's favorite prime, or at least the one he seems obsessed with in his latest book. Hence the non-arbitrariness.