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nishant_reads_nothing's review
4.0
This book is enticing. It draws fantastical pictures of the mundane, makes you think about disparate systems and how complexity is hidden in them. Though the book is framed around certain mathematical principles of nonlinear systems, by the end of it I only had a vague idea of what it all meant. The book, instead of being an authoritative technical text, is a history of chaos theory, and the people from seemingly unconnected fields that developed the foundations of chaos. The subtitle of the book is "making a new science", so it is intended to be such an account, and to that end it delivers.
I found Gleick's writing engaging, and though at times I felt the shift between anecdotes was incongruous, the motivations of the people that had these strange ideas was made clear in an interesting way. Most importantly, the book provides plenty of metaphors that allows one to begin to understand the complexity of chaos.
"You don't see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it," Shaw said, echoing Thomas S. Kuhn.
I think the vagueness is sort of deliberate (and necessary), because toward the end of the book, Gleick dedicates a page to different definitions of chaos, as understood by different scientists. Funnily enough, the book (published in 1987) deals with the 1950-1980s, effectively a thirty year period, give or take. It's been more than thirty years since this has been published, and it has made me curious enough to go explore the chaos that has ensued since then.
I found Gleick's writing engaging, and though at times I felt the shift between anecdotes was incongruous, the motivations of the people that had these strange ideas was made clear in an interesting way. Most importantly, the book provides plenty of metaphors that allows one to begin to understand the complexity of chaos.
"You don't see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it," Shaw said, echoing Thomas S. Kuhn.
I think the vagueness is sort of deliberate (and necessary), because toward the end of the book, Gleick dedicates a page to different definitions of chaos, as understood by different scientists. Funnily enough, the book (published in 1987) deals with the 1950-1980s, effectively a thirty year period, give or take. It's been more than thirty years since this has been published, and it has made me curious enough to go explore the chaos that has ensued since then.
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