Scientists have recently discovered a new law of nature. Its footprints are virtually everywhere - in the spread of forest fires, mass extinctions, traffic jams, earthquakes, stock-market fluctuations, the rise and fall of nations, and even trends in fashion, music and art. Wherever we look, the world is modelled on a simple template: like a steep pile of sand, it is poised on the brink of instability, with avalanches - in events, ideas or whatever - following a universal pattern of change. This remarkable discovery heralds what Mark Buchanan calls the new science of 'ubiquity', a science whose secret lies in the stuff of the everyday world. Combining literary flair with scientific rigour, this enthralling book documents the coming revolution by telling the story of the researchers' exploration of the law, their ingenious work and unexpected insights. Mark Buchanan reveals how the principle of ubiquity will help us to manage, control and predict the future. More controversially, he claims that it may well contain the beginnings of a mathematics of cultural and historical change. Every decade sees a major scientific breakthrough that has implications that go way beyond science. 'Ubiquity' is one of them. This book, the world's first on the topic, will change how we think about the world and our place in it. Chaos Disorder from order. Complexity Complexity from simplicity. UBIQUITY World has a natural 'rhythm': there is a mysterious archetypal organisation that works in the world at all levels and which gives rise to a universal pattern of change - in groups of people, things or ideas.
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First came James Gleick's Chaos, then Roger Lewin's Complexity, and now we have Mark Buchanan's fascinating new book Ubiquity. One of the most interesting discoveries made by complexity theorists is that some systems seem to exhibit rather curious but mathematically similar behaviours when poised in what has come to be known as the "critical state". A pile of sand in the moments before an avalanche occurs somewhere on its surface seems to be in such a state and the magnitudes of avalanches measured over a period of time can be described using a mathematical equation called a power function. A power function description in this particular context implies that the timing and magnitude of avalanches on the surface of the sand pile will be utterly unpredictable.
This key insight into the behaviour of certain types of system forms the basis for the rest of the book. What if, for instance, the Earth's crust is in something approximating a critical state and earthquakes timings and magnitudes similar in distribution to avalanches on a sand pile? This would imply that earthquake prediction is virtually impossible, an important conclusion given that huge amounts of money continue to be spent in numerous countries around the world for this very purpose.
And what if extinction in the fossil record, stock market fluctuations or tumultuous events in human history are also explicable in terms of critical state theory? If so, then we may be on the verge of "a new science of history". Are critical state theorists any nearer now to anything approaching a unification of knowledge? The jury is still out, but don't wait for a verdict that may be a long time coming--read the provocative Ubiquity and judge for yourself. --Chris Lavers
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Scientists have recently discovered a new law of nature. Its footprints are virtually everywhere – in the microscopic behaviour of magnets, the spread of forest fires, the extinction of species, the pattern of earthquakes, the rise and fall of financial markets, the flow of traffic, the growth of cities, the outbreak of wars and even trends in fashion, music and art. Wherever we look, the world appears to be modelled on a simple template: like a steep pile of sand, it is poised on the brink of upheaval, with avalanches – in events, ideas or whatever – following a single universal pattern of change.
Scientists have recently discovered a new law of nature. Its footprints are virtually everywhere – in the microscopic behaviour of magnets, the spread of forest fires, the extinction of species, the pattern of earthquakes, the rise and fall of financial markets, the flow of traffic, the growth of cities, the outbreak of wars and even trends in fashion, music and art. Wherever we look, the world appears to be modelled on a simple template: like a steep pile of sand, it is poised on the brink of upheaval, with avalanches – in events, ideas or whatever – following a single universal pattern of change.
This remarkable finding heralds the advent of ‘ubiquity’, a science whose secret lies in the stuff of the everyday world. Combining literary flair with scientific rigour, Mark Buchanan tells the story of the maverick researchers who are exploring the law, their ingenious work and unexpected insights. He shows how this new universal principle will transform our understanding of the science of prediction and make it easier for us to manage and control the future. And in revealing how ubiquity is unifying science, he proposes that it may contain the beginnings of a ‘science of science’, and perhaps a dynamics of human culture and history. Indeed, without ubiquity, says the US physicist James Crutchfield, ‘the very enterprise of science would be doomed from the start’.
At the dawn of a new century we are witnessing the emergence of the biggest new idea in scientific research since chaos and complexity – an idea of tremendous power, beauty and scope, the implications of which go way beyond science. This book, the first to document the discovery and its impact in full detail, will unify the way we think about the world and our place in it.
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It was 11 a.m. on a fine summer morning in Sarajevo, 28 June 1914, when the driver of an automobile carrying two passengers made a wrong turn. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
It was 11 a.m. on a fine summer morning in Sarajevo, 28 June 1914, when the driver of an automobile carrying two passengers made a wrong turn. Read the first page
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a book from an author with a Ph.D. in physics, which is fascinating by history and can cite Albert Camus. The book is both about physics and history, much as Steven Jay Gould's Wonderful Life is about biology and history. You can draw many similarities between the two books, not the least the fact that Gould and Buchanan are both good writers.
Buchanan does a good job in transmitting the flavour of theoretical physics in the making. From his book you can learn a lot about the way physicists looks for new problems and try to solve them: making simple (even crude) models of reality, trying to guess the relevant variables, establishing the right connections to experimental data. The critical state is a very suggestive concept, but if you want to do physics you must be very careful to avoid speculation and stick to mathematical generalisation and the effort to make testable predictions.
The main prediction about self-organised criticality is that it is unpredictable. Physicists can point to some very nice regularity in, say, the distribution of earthquakes or wildfires: but nobody can tell where and where the next big earthquake will strike. Why? Because the earth crust is in a critical state, and in such a system "history matters". Every single event in the crust is "froze" in a sequence of events and you should know all of them to tell if a particular site will be struck by a major earthquake or not. The methods of physics show their own limit and give way to historical narrative.
This is really a beautiful book. If you have read some half-mystical book on cosmology or elementary particles, and believe that physics is about metaphysics, get it and come back to quite interesting Earth.
Buchanan does a good job in transmitting the flavour of theoretical physics in the making. From his book you can learn a lot about the way physicists looks for new problems and try to solve them: making simple (even crude) models of reality, trying to guess the relevant variables, establishing the right connections to experimental data. The critical state is a very suggestive concept, but if you want to do physics you must be very careful to avoid speculation and stick to mathematical generalisation and the effort to make testable predictions.
The main prediction about self-organised criticality is that it is unpredictable. Physicists can point to some very nice regularity in, say, the distribution of earthquakes or wildfires: but nobody can tell where and where the next big earthquake will strike. Why? Because the earth crust is in a critical state, and in such a system "history matters". Every single event in the crust is "froze" in a sequence of events and you should know all of them to tell if a particular site will be struck by a major earthquake or not. The methods of physics show their own limit and give way to historical narrative.
This is really a beautiful book. If you have read some half-mystical book on cosmology or elementary particles, and believe that physics is about metaphysics, get it and come back to quite interesting Earth.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Hardcover
I'm well into the whole Complexity field - I think its a fascinating area of study that we've only just scraped the surface of. For those of you who found Roger Lewin's Complexity interesting but less than satisfying, or Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe a bit too oriented to biology, this book offers a great introduction to the field. It covers a diverse number of subjects from earthquakes, financial markets, breakthroughs in science, wars and human interaction but without having to be an expert in any of them. While some may struggle with the lack of physics - this is the whole point. Scrape away all the clutter and look at the underlying patterns, and their drivers. Enlightening to say the least.
If you liked this then try any of Stuart Kauffman's books for a more indepth treatment, Duncan Watt's Small Worlds if you like graphy theory.
I agree that it does become a little repeatative and you can sense that the author thinks so too. However, does this not illustrate just how ubiquitous the underlying pattern is?
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Hardcover
I found this book very enlightening. The underlying simplicity of the explaination of the dynamics of extremely complex structures is very powerful, and attractive. It does stimulate thinking about the application to everyday experiences.
If it has one fault, it is that after the 7th example, it becomes too repeatative, the reader knows what the conclusion will be without reading on. I'm afraid I couldn't finish it for that reason. However, I am glad I read as much as I did.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Hardcover
Physics may be the key to explaining everthing, but this book shows clearly that a physicist can't. The idea is compelling, but the ground work not. Earthquakes are well explained, but when it comes to the subtitle "a Science of History", other than vague references to other books, one is left with empty hands. The mechanisms behind history are completly missing. Also other interesting fields such as information networks in biology are ignored.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Yes, ubiquity is in the dictionary and it is something that is ever present and has the ability to be in many places at the same time. Mark Buchanan provides an intriguing explanation of why a whole range of complex things in the world around us behave as they do, and brings something new and almost magical into the world of science.
Some may expect that the world is governed by laws and equations, while social behaviour is mostly unpredictable. We have special laws that tell us how electricity behaves as it does, why like magnets repel each other and why, if you sit under an apple tree, you might get a Granny Smith bombarding the top of your head. There are perfectly rational explanations for all these wonders. Nevertheless there remain many highly complex situations for which we simply have no guiding principles or laws, and this is where Mark Buchanan, formerly an editor at Nature and New Scientist, brings new light with the concept of `ubiquity'.
What if systems of all kinds can reach a state where, for example, just one relatively trivial event can trigger off a devastating earthquake, a tsunami, or any other phenomenal event just waiting to happen? Thousands if not millions of grains of sand can be dropped, a grain at a time, and the resultant pile, or sand castle, remains relatively immobile. Yet just one more grain dropped somewhere can produce devastation: the system has reached a critical state. Buchanan gives many instances of this criticality at work. He cites the day an Archduke's driver took a wrong turning in Sarajevo and a startled assassin took full advantage. That began the sequence that led to the bloody First World War, according to popular history, yet there have been countless other plausible `triggers' reported.... Read more ›
Some may expect that the world is governed by laws and equations, while social behaviour is mostly unpredictable. We have special laws that tell us how electricity behaves as it does, why like magnets repel each other and why, if you sit under an apple tree, you might get a Granny Smith bombarding the top of your head. There are perfectly rational explanations for all these wonders. Nevertheless there remain many highly complex situations for which we simply have no guiding principles or laws, and this is where Mark Buchanan, formerly an editor at Nature and New Scientist, brings new light with the concept of `ubiquity'.
What if systems of all kinds can reach a state where, for example, just one relatively trivial event can trigger off a devastating earthquake, a tsunami, or any other phenomenal event just waiting to happen? Thousands if not millions of grains of sand can be dropped, a grain at a time, and the resultant pile, or sand castle, remains relatively immobile. Yet just one more grain dropped somewhere can produce devastation: the system has reached a critical state. Buchanan gives many instances of this criticality at work. He cites the day an Archduke's driver took a wrong turning in Sarajevo and a startled assassin took full advantage. That began the sequence that led to the bloody First World War, according to popular history, yet there have been countless other plausible `triggers' reported.... Read more ›
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
recommendable
This book is definitely worth a read. A true eye opener.
5 stars is reserved for the genius books (when I find them) ;)
5 stars is reserved for the genius books (when I find them) ;)
Published on 3 May 2008 by Jon Loldrup
4.0 out of 5 stars
lacks a bit of punch at the end...
Very good book, liked the other one too (ubiquity) but I felt it lacked a bit of punch at the end. The ideas and theories put forward with excellent supporting examples seemed to... Read more
Published on 26 Jan 2007 by Mr. Alexander W. Lepingwell
4.0 out of 5 stars
Ubiquity Versus Generalization
Firstly, it is important that I qualify my comments by stating that I read this book as a layperson. Read more
Published on 17 Dec 2002 by taking a rest
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Physics of History
CERTAIN complicated systems, under certain circumstances, have been discovered to behave in mathematically simple, similar ways. Read more
Published on 10 Jun 2001
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating and Thought-Provoking Ideas!
Definitely a fascinating read. Well worth it! The writer claims that we can all learn something about what to expect in the future -- even if this means expecting to be surprised... Read more
Published on 20 Feb 2001
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very interesting and very clear
This was a very interesting read. I found it very clear, persuasive, and intriguing. My only quibbles are that I thought it went on a bit (it became a little repetitive towards the... Read more
Published on 1 Feb 2001
4.0 out of 5 stars
Worthwhile Reading
I found "Ubiquity" to be an enjoyable and interesting science book.The ideas introduced are relativley new and have not been covered a great deal in non-academic... Read more
Published on 24 Nov 2000
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very interesting - def. read. for pseudos like me!
1. Very good book. V.rewarding to read. 2. Nicely written (in the literary sense). 3. Fundamental concept is very interesting. Read more
Published on 1 Nov 2000 by Sumit Sahni
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