- Paperback: 512 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; New edition edition (29 Jun 1995)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0140246754
- ISBN-13: 978-0140246759
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.6 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,532,161 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
The Collapse of Chaos
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Product Description
Product Description
Science's traditional answers to the question: "How does complexity arise in nature?" are given at the beginning of this book. It shows how intelligence and human culture can be traced back to atomic structure, reducing the whole of nature to simple laws of fundamental physics. However, the book then proceeds to show that "How does complexity arise?" is really the wrong question. It proposes that a more interesting question is "Why do simple structures exist at all?". Scientific reductionism is useful but does not give the whole truth: it tells how but not why; it looks at insides but not outsides, content but not context. The subject-matter of traditional science is re-examined from a different viewpoint, focusing on the ability of complicated rules to generate simple behaviour, through the "collapse of chaos".
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First Sentence
A yeshiva boy-a young man studying in a rabbinical college-took instruction from three rabbis. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
A yeshiva boy-a young man studying in a rabbinical college-took instruction from three rabbis. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
28 of 31 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The title of this book is slightly misleading, as it implies it is about chaos, complexity and simplicity.
In fact the first half of the book is a guided tour of biology, chemisty and physics. Covering how these great sciences got where they are today, from Newton to Darwin, DNA to the lattice structure of diamonds.
The second half then presents a new way to look at science. Rather then delving inside something to find underlying rules, we should view things in context.
For example, traditionally the law of gravity is seen as the underlying principle that explains planetary motion. Cohen and Stewart argue that it is just a rule (of thumb?) that fits the facts, and that there is no LAW of gravity, no grand design. Gravity is just the way it is, and our 'Law' of gravity suits our needs.
It seems a subtle distinction, but on reading this book it is quite an important one, and it has certainly given me a different view of the world.
Very intelligent and always interesting, this book is written for the layman and is always at pains to explains matters thoroughly and use every possible analogy to help get ideas across.
This book is worth twice the money for the first half alone - a perfect primer for those interested in science, but who dont want to get technical.
Cohen and Stewart are high level experts in their respective fields, and yet they write simply and lucidly, resulting in a desire to read further.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a witty and at times brilliant book. The authors argue that the reductionist approach to science, which has flourished over the last 300 years, for a more holistic or contrextual approach. In the reductionist approach, scientists have choped problems into manageable bits - lab experiments or discreet mathematical problems - that eventually they assume will be fit together into a coherent whole. Nature in this view functions as a vast machine they can reduce and separate into its component parts.
TO prove their point, the authors embark on a dazzling tour of biology, chemistry and physics. But something is missing say the authors. What we know, they claim, are tiny islands in a sea of ignorance; it is self limiting as the larger questions get neglected. It is the causes of simplicity, they say - the order that suddenly emerges - that researchers should explore.
So, they conclude, it is time for a new set of questions. Unfortunately, just when we expect something new, it is here that the book gets a bit vague, with the authors falling back on anecdotes and speculation. They try to coin a new vocabulary ("simplexity" for the old and "complicity" for theirs); offer some diagrams of what they want, including an odd picture of mixing smoke with a unicorn head; and they harp on strange and abrupt conclusions, such as the importance of squid fat to the evolution of the human brain. But they do not offer a coherent new paradigm.
An uneven effort, but fun and very funny at times.
TO prove their point, the authors embark on a dazzling tour of biology, chemistry and physics. But something is missing say the authors. What we know, they claim, are tiny islands in a sea of ignorance; it is self limiting as the larger questions get neglected. It is the causes of simplicity, they say - the order that suddenly emerges - that researchers should explore.
So, they conclude, it is time for a new set of questions. Unfortunately, just when we expect something new, it is here that the book gets a bit vague, with the authors falling back on anecdotes and speculation. They try to coin a new vocabulary ("simplexity" for the old and "complicity" for theirs); offer some diagrams of what they want, including an odd picture of mixing smoke with a unicorn head; and they harp on strange and abrupt conclusions, such as the importance of squid fat to the evolution of the human brain. But they do not offer a coherent new paradigm.
An uneven effort, but fun and very funny at times.
28 of 32 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This book is from what I call the 'anti-reductionist' school of scientific thinking. Its aim is apparently to break the link between what happens at the atomic level and the higher level, i.e. the more visible world of plants, animals, planets etc. If this break could be achieved, the world could then be claimed as free from determinism. This is a key area for philosophers and physicists, and it is linked to the existence of free will. The authors, who are experts in the fields of evolution and modern mathematics, have a mass of material at their disposal, and this seems at times to overwhelm them; my impression is that they could quite easily turn out thousands and thousands of pages on the theme! And that is, in my opinion, the main problem, for if one truly understands a subject, one should be able to express ideas and conclusions quite concisely. After reading the book from cover to cover, I was not at all convinced that there was a cohesive message in any of it. That isn't to say that it doesn't contain a mass of most interesting information; there is surely a lot of fascinating material in the book. But, it seems to lack analysis.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
An antidote to the heralding of the Theory Of Everything
This is a brilliantly written and ingeniously styled book. Laid out in two reciprocal halves, with exquisitely mirror-image chapter titles, the book explores the paradoxical... Read more
Published 13 months ago by anozama
Reductive simplicity vs emergent complexity.... and simplicity
Having just read the other reviews about this great book, I am a bit surprised how little they refer to the central themes! Read more
Published 16 months ago by JAG
Hard to follow
So without repeating a lot of what has already been written above, I'd like to concur Bobobob5 on the whole. Read more
Published on 2 Nov 2004 by MR O S FREKE
Interesting, funny and erudite
In my view an excellent book. It is hard to make science interesting and few writers do it well. It is even harder to make it funny, which these two also manage to do. Read more
Published on 7 Jan 2004 by Jon Freeman
Excellent new approach to explaining the world and science
I have been reading quite a few books on the emerging science of complexity, on evolution and I am even trying to do a degree in 'chaos'. Something seemed to be lacking. Read more
Published on 21 Jun 2000
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