Chaos: Making a New Science

Another popular science book, whoo!

Though I have mixed feelings about the genre as a whole. Since they're written with the general population as the intended audience, they really don't say much about the topic. The focus is usually on the history of the subject and important contributors. I'm confident that the associated Wikipedia articles contain more technical information. However, the plus side is that the quality of the writing is much better and the ones I pick up are rather humorous.

Moving on,

The content of the book deals with the emergence of the study of chaos theory, and is easily summarized through the following quotation, describing a paradigm shift from

Simple systems behave in simple ways.
Complex behaviour implies complex causes.
Different systems behave differently.

to

Simple systems give arise to complex behaviours.
Complex systems give arise to simple behaviours. 
And most important, the laws of complexity hold universally, caring not at all for the details of a system's constituent atoms.

Continuing from the first paragraph about popular science books, the explanation of the subject goes as far as "what the theory is", excluding the "how it predicts what it predicts" and "why it works". To be fair, answering the latter two question requires significantly more knowledge than I/the public possess.

Now back to the book, there's an interesting quotation on what theories are/do:

The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work.

John Von Neumann

Cue my calc prof stressing the importance of knowing how apply the math we learned to model real life situations.

And in relation to professors, I found the last sentence hilarious:

"Faculty members are familiar with a certain kind of person who looks to the mathematicians like a good physicist and looks to the physicists like a good mathematician. Very properly, they do not want that kind of person around." [Murray-Gell Man]. The standards of the two professions were very different. Mathematicians proved theorems by ratiocination; physicists' proofs used heavier equipment.

Generalizing to the difference between hard and soft sciences:

In the hard sciences, investigators found it easier to amass their thousands or millions of data points. Economists, like biologists, dealt with a world of willful living beings. Economists studied the most elusive creatures of all.

This description is how I always imagined university when I was young:

[The] room taken over by the chaos group developed its own atmosphere, with piles of apper and pictures of Tahitian islanders on the walls, and eventually, printouts of strange attractors. Ar almost any hour, though night was a safer bet than morning, a visitor could see members of the group rearranging circuitry, tanking out patch cords, arguing about consciousness or evolution, adjusting an oscilloscope display, or just staring while a glowing green spot traced a curve of light, its orbit flickering and seething like something alive.

(this is going off on a tangent) I feel slightly sad that I'm not planning on doing any post-grad research. Having a space that's dedicated to the pursue of a single thing seems so wonderful. Maybe that's why I love looking at photos of artists' studios.

(and back again) The next quotation is in relation to the previous book. An explanation for the existence of the universe was that it was just the result of a quantum fluctuation. The rebuttal, however, was that the laws of physics would require an explanation, therefore this didn't really count as the first-cause. I find it a coincidence to see the author of this book mention that

I always felt that the spontaneous emergence of self-organization ought to be part of physics.

And my favourite for the last:

"God plays dice with the universe," is [Joseph] Ford's answer to Einstein's famous question. "But they're loaded dice. And the main objective of physics now is find out by what rules were they loaded and how can we use them for our own ends."

I'll always have a soft spot for any answer to Einstein's statement of "I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice".