A fascinating and engaging look into the development of Chaos Theory. This focuses more on the history and scientists involved in the early days, rather than on hard mathematics. It is written in a clear format that is easily accessible to all readers, regardless of scientific or mathematical background. ( )

Can one measure disorder or randomness in a closed system like business research? Can can one or a set of preconceived notions about an expected outcome effect that outcome? Cosmologists like Stephen Hawkins has pondered if the universe is ruled by entropy, creating greater and greater disorder, how does order arise?
My question, is in which ways can a marketing plan, which hinges on a pre-set aims of say competitive analysis be so far different that its results lead some companies to ruin, and others successful beyond their orginal projections.

Very interesting, but not as well-written or as accessible as "Faster." Personally, I could have done with more concept and less profiling of the individual personalities involved. ( )

Chaos: Making a New Science is about a variety of topics: the sensitivity of some systems to their initial conditions, the weather being a prime example, which makes detailed long-term forecasting impossible; nonlinear systems; fractals; strange attractors; dynamical systems; etc. It is also about the people who discovered and studied these phenomena. It describes their difficulties in introducing these ideas into the scientific community. That's not an unusual situation in science. Einstein's special theory of relativity, for example, despite it's mathematical simplicity and fit with evidence, was not readily accepted.

Gleick sometimes strays a bit from his topic, as when he briefly talks about Darwinian thinking in biology. He writes, "In biology, however, Darwin firmly established teleology as the central mode of thinking about cause. [...] Natural selection operates not on genes or embryos, but on the final product. [...] Final cause survives in science wherever Darwinian thinking has become habitual." (se p. 201 in the original hardback edition) I don't know where he got his information, but he got it wrong. Darwinian evolution through natural selection is not teleological. In What Evolution Is, Ernst Mayr writes, "... those who adopt teleological thinking will argue that progress is due to a built-in drive or striving toward perfection. Darwin rejected such a causation and so do modern Darwinians ..." In Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel Dennett writes, "The theory of natural selection shows how ever feature of the natural world can be the product of a blind, unforesightful, nonteleological, ultimately mechanical process of differential reproduction over long periods of time." The nonteleological nature of Darwinian evolution is one of the principle themes of Dennett's book.

Chaos is a long book about somewhat difficult ideas, mostly of a mathematical nature, but the mathematics is largely suppressed. One important point that I think he makes very clear is that very simple equations when iterated in real space can exhibit surprising behavior.

The topics of this book are mostly outside my areas of even limited expertise, but I was wondering as I read it how many of the phenomena it describes depend on the use of real numbers, i.e., numbers that in general require infinite precision, e.g. π. If physical theories were to be developed on the basis of discrete mathematics, would some of these problems of chaos disappear? Consider the very first topic in the book: the sensitivity of weather models to initial conditions. With limited precision measuring instruments there are infinitely many states of the weather, if described by real numbers, that cannot be distinguished. So, if small differences, below the precision of measurement, can make a big difference as the weather develops, we have a problem that limits predictability. But, if the physics of weather were described by a mathematics with finite precision, then we might be able to make completely accurate measurements of initial conditions—in principle.

I found Chaos interesting to read, but I am always skeptical about reading explanations of science written by journalists, just as I am skeptical of explanations of science written by philosophers. ( )

My favorite chaos book. Interesting and informative. Perfectly readable for a layperson or a scientist. ( )