Per Bak (1948–2002)

Interesting romp across different areas of application of self-organised criticality, following the development of the field over the course of its early phase. There is also an interesting perspective that comes from a scientist that is working on the problem and describes how they handle the problems and the opportunities that you would not get from a third party.

However, the book's title overclaims, SOC cannot fully explain how nature works, and in some ways, I get the sense we don't show more completely understand how SOC works, which are similar classes of phenomena and which are different. Also, the book is not entirely clear, I don't feel like I learned so much about SOC compared to what I knew from Wikipedia. But there were experiments and domains I was not aware of that made the book interesting and worthwhile. show less