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Reddit mentions of Chaos: Making a New Science

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Reddit mentions: 41

We found 41 Reddit mentions of Chaos: Making a New Science. Here are the top ones.

Chaos: Making a New Science
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Found 41 comments on Chaos: Making a New Science:

u/LargeFood · 23 pointsr/math

For those interested in a popular overview of the topic, I recommend Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick. It does a pretty good job of popular explanations of the theory, and talks about a lot of key people in the field.

u/Gargatua13013 · 14 pointsr/askscience

I'll refer to an example I've gleaned from James Gleick book on Chaos.

He refers to some older work on simulation where data had to be inputted by hand. Those simulations would sometimes crash, and you'd have to re-input the values of the variables for whatever point of the simulation you were at. Sometimes, to save time, they would round off the last digit of the decimals, because life is too short for this shit, and because why would changing a parameter by 0.0001 have any noticeable effect? The results would change a lot, sometimes drastically, from these small roundings.

to quote from one of the earlier linked references:

In the 1960s the weather scientist Edward Lorenz observed that minute variations in the initial values of variables in his twelve-variable computer weather model could result in grossly divergent weather patterns:

Two states differing by imperceptible amounts may eventually evolve into two considerably different states … If, then, there is any error whatever in observing the present state—and in any real system such errors seem inevitable—an acceptable prediction of an instantaneous state in the distant future may well be impossible….In view of the inevitable inaccuracy and incompleteness of weather observations, precise very-long-range forecasting would seem to be nonexistent.

Such sensitive dependence on initial conditions means that the further one goes into the future the more inaccurate predictions become. Systems that are sensitive to initial conditions and bounded are said to be chaotic.

As to the other specifics of your question, you'd need an atmospheric science guy for that ... I'm more of Straight Earth Sci.

u/ColloquialInternet · 14 pointsr/NoStupidQuestions

There is a famous paper that almost uses that in its name. The paper is Does the flap of a Butterfly's wings in Brazil Set off a Tornado in Texas

This is why it is referred to as the Butterfly effect rather than, say, the Ant Effect or something like that.

If you're interested in the subject, and you want sort of a primer on the whole thing, I'd recommend http://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0143113453/ which is old enough to be at your local library for free as well

u/SharmaK · 9 pointsr/books

For some physics :
Penrose - Road to Reality

Gleick - Chaos

Some math/philosophy :
Hofstadter - Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Anything early by Dawkins if you want to avoid the atheist stuff though his latest is good too.

Anything by Robert Wright for the evolution of human morality.

Pinker for language and the Mind.

Matt Ridley for more biology.

u/avenirweiss · 7 pointsr/books

I know I must be missing some, but these are all that I can think of at the moment.

Fiction:

Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges

The Stranger by Albert Camus

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

White Noise by Don Delilo

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot

Everything that Rises Must Converge by Flannery O'Connor

His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by DFW

Infinite Jest by DFW

Of these, you can't go wrong with Infinite Jest and the Collected Fictions of Borges. His Dark Materials is an easy and classic read, probably the lightest fare on this list.

Non-Fiction:

The Music of the Primes by Marcus du Sautoy

Chaos by James Gleick

How to be Gay by David Halperin

Barrel Fever by David Sedaris

Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls by David Sedaris

Secret Historian by Justin Spring

Of these, Secret Historian was definitely the most interesting, though How to be Gay was a good intro to queer theory.

u/Cyphierre · 5 pointsr/math

It's not a proof, but I always considered the equation yielding the Mandelbrot set to be elegant, and its result visually beautiful.

Here's a good explanation that assumes very little starting knowledge.

Chaos by James Gleick is a fantastic narrative of the history and personalities of fractal geometry and chaos theory. It's the book that got me interested, before I knew any higher math, in the eighties when it was a bestseller.

u/DemonicCatapult · 5 pointsr/Showerthoughts

Pick up a book. Don't worry. Its not very mathy and way easy to read.

u/somercet · 5 pointsr/KotakuInAction

>the scientific method can be used to predict the effect of an intervention regarding climate change

Wow, okay. Rule #1: the scientific method does not predict anything. The method is used to test theories, either very grand and general (Newton's Three Laws) or very small and specific ("X in the presence of Y will correlate more to Z than without.").

Rule #2: theory does not "tell the future," it only predicts things within scope. Speaking of Newton: for a long time, physicists and astronomers had no idea why unpredictable perturbations appeared in planetary orbits, or why their equations became unmanageably large. Then, an entire branch of mathematics, hinted at for hundreds of years, was developed that explained exactly how unpredictable something would be.

Your expectation that climatology will ever be a predictive science in blocks of time of less than 10,000 years strikes me as absurdly optimistic.

u/sv0f · 5 pointsr/compsci

Gleick's Chaos: The Making of a New Science is one of my favorite popular science books ever. Highly recommended.

u/SlashdotExPat · 4 pointsr/videos

This is great great and pretty accessible book on chaos theory if anyone's interested: https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0143113453

u/BitAlt · 3 pointsr/BitcoinMarkets

No.

Sure could simulate a bunch of possibilities, but that will just give you a distribution of possibilities. i.e. "Up, down, or sideways".

> Could someone bother to explain the possibilities?

https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0143113453

u/chakalakasp · 3 pointsr/space

This is one I'm familiar with: Chaos: Making a New Science https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143113453/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_FsTKxb9B7A0QR

u/frozenbobo · 2 pointsr/Python

For anyone interested in this topic, I can recommend two sources for newcomers.

Conversational, largely non-technical: Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick

Technical (requires knowledge of ordinary differential equations, but highly readable): Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos by Steven H. Strogatz

u/Kowzorz · 2 pointsr/woahdude

Moar chaos!. If you're the reading man, I highly recommend reading Chaos: Making a New Science about the discovery and applications of fractals and I Am A Strange Loop about fractals and their relation to the concept of self and other things with "strange loopiness".

u/anachronic · 2 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

Perhaps this book is above a 5 year old reading level, but "Chaos" is a phenomenal book written in layman's terms about chaos theory, fractals, etc...


I read it a few years back and it explained everything very clearly and was very easy to follow.


http://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0143113453/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346333614&sr=1-1&keywords=chaos

u/mushed05 · 2 pointsr/askscience

Just have to say that reading Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick a bit later on in your learning will change your perspective on everything. Such a good, fun read too.

u/powerplay2009 · 2 pointsr/Documentaries

I am perhaps a bit late to this, but if you want some more stuff on chaos, and not just fractals, I've got a couple book suggestions.

The first is a narrative about the beginnings of Chaos. The writing is superb, and you don't need any sort of mathematical chops to understand it. It's primarily about the early scientists of chaos and their stories. It's called Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick.

The second is more of a textbook on the subject, with some chapters on chaos, as well as other fascinating non-linear phenomena. It requires a fair bit of mathematical background, but if you're up for it, it's a lot of fun to learn. It's called Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos by Steven Strogatz.

u/icecreambones · 2 pointsr/math

This is a neat book.

u/centralserb · 2 pointsr/science

This is my favorite documentary evar. I recommend it to all of my scientifically / mathematically inclined friends and co-workers. I even showed it to my parents.

If you find the topic interesting, check out James Gleick's book Chaos: Making a New Science.

It tells the story of the independent research projects that added to resurgent fields like Dynamical Systems, Self Organization, Fractals etc. --aka Chaos Theory.

Enjoy the film!

u/Chaoticmass · 2 pointsr/DrosteEffect

I read in the book Chaos: Making a New Science that he was called in to help try to figure out how to remove interference from a transmission, and found out that it was like the Cantor set (another kind of fractal). You might have been thinking about that.

Think of it like, you hear some scratch in your radio transmission, and you 'zoom in' on the scratch. You'll find that it's not one continuous bit of static, there's gaps in it. So you zoom in one one of the smaller bits, only to find that it also has gaps... etc.

u/fridofrido · 2 pointsr/math

Topology, which is about the shapes of things made from rubber, can be rather fun. Think donuts, Mobius bands, Klein bottles and knots (warning: there is also a subject called "general topology" or "point-set topology", which is rather boring, if technically necessary)

For example, a simple child's experiment: if you cut a Mobius band into two at the middle line, you get a single band, not two ones. Then if you cut that into two, you get two bands, but they will be interleaved!

This stuff be can be approached both from a rigorous point of view but also intuitively, the latter being much more fun. Unfortunately I don't know any popular-level book at the moment :( Possibly chapter 0 from Hatcher's book can help a bit - it's available free here: http://www.math.cornell.edu/~hatcher/AT/ATchapters.html

Projective geometry is a subject which is accessible at your level, and is really fun! For example, it turns out that the different conic sections (ellipse, parabola, hiperbola) are in fact the same thing secretly!

Complex analysis is also really fun, but probably a bit too advanced for you at the moment.

Finite group theory can be pretty fun, depending on your tastes (do you like algebra?), and it goes from pretty easily accessible to stuff that only a handful people understand, so you can always find problems which match your level!

hope this helps, and feel free to ask!

edit: oh, and there is a fantastic popular-level book about chaos theory. I think it was this one (I read it when I was younger)

u/RealityApologist · 2 pointsr/askphilosophy

I'm very glad this was helpful. These concepts are very widely misunderstood, but an intuitive conceptual understanding of them isn't terribly hard to grasp. Few people that are in a position to articulate such a basic account take the time to give one, though.

>I'm feeling like there is some implicit connection to epistemology and induction here. Can I trust my gut?

That seems right to me, but it's an extremely general observation. There's some connection to epistemology and induction in pretty much any area of science. I'm not sure if there's a unique one here. What exactly do you have in mind?

>As for the rest of your comment, what else can I say other than you're a great teacher and made it all extremely easy to understand? I really appreciated all of the concrete examples, e.g., the molecule box and especially the solar system example, because it helped provide some perspective on something I was already familiar with in another sense, while allowing me to approach it through a new paradigm. This is all very interesting, to be quite honest. Who knew I'd be going to bed knowing what the differences between chaos, order, and organization were, or how to properly imagine/conceive of them? Not me. But you did it with a few posts.

Thanks a lot--it's really nice to hear that. I really enjoy teaching, which is part of why I dedicate so much of my (rather limited) free time to posting here. It's great to hear that people are getting something out of it. Chaos is one of those ideas that everyone has heard of (and most think is interesting), but few people actually understand in any semi-rigorous way. If you're interested in learning more about this kind of stuff, there's an excellent talk by Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute discussing chaos and prediction in science. Gleik's book Chaos: The Making of a New Science is also a great popular account. On the topic of complexity more generally, Melanie Mitchell's book Complexity: A Guided Tour is very, very accessible while still being quite rigorous and accurate.

>Anyway, I read the book a few years ago, but I remember him writing about how we were trying to figure out the shape of the universe and how our choices of universe shape were underdetermined by our observations, perhaps for similar reasons to what you've written here:

Yeah, there are definitely some connections with underdetermination here. One of the big areas in which chaos matters (and the reason that I really care about it) is in the computational modeling of certain physical systems, including the weather and the climate. The connections between computational forecasting and chaotic dynamics are really interesting, and have lots of practical implications.

>I think your clarification of the appropriate dimension at the top has helped me to better understand why the question I asked wasn't particularly good (with regards to linearity(? if that's a word)), and why an organized system is pattern rich.

'Linearity' is definitely a word. The basic intuitive definition is just that in a linear system, the output is directly proportional to the input, so a very small change will have a similarly small impact. More formally, linearity implies that if two solutions to some equation are both within the allowable space of solutions, then the addition of those solutions is within the allowable space as well. The multiplication of real numbers, for instance, is linear: if x y is a real number and w z is a real number, then (x y) + (w z) has to be a real number too.

Interestingly, it's linearity that gives rise to many of the strange behaviors in quantum mechanics. Because the math of QM is linear, the fact that some particle can be in the state |x> or in the state |y> implies that it can be in the state |x> + |y> as well: a superposition of two states is just the linear combination of the states.

u/nexusofcrap · 2 pointsr/askscience

Check out some Chaos Theory by James Gleick and the wikipedia article on it. Can't link to both without losing my comment...

Edit: Here

u/redweasel · 2 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

I attribute that narrowness of focus mainly to a general failure-of-imagination on the part of most people talking and thinking about the subject. I congratulate you on taking a step out of the box by at least noticing this implicit -- and entirely arbitrary, and probably far too limiting -- constraint.

Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen collaborated on a novel called Wheelers in which they invent some -- I think, plausible -- lifeforms totally unlike "life as we know it." A couple of others occur in Stephen Baxter's "Manifold" novels (see the "Frequently Bought Together" section a little ways down the page).

Stewart and Cohen also explore life-not-as-we-know-it in a more serious book, What Does A Martian Look Like?. I haven't actually read that one yet but it's on my ASAP list.

Personally, I believe that life in some form can, and probably will, arise anyplace it possibly can; the main requirement seems (to me, without yet reading the aforementioned book) to be a short list of simple rules for information transfer, balanced just right between order and disorder. To paraphrase someone who may or may not be James Gleick, "All the interesting stuff happens in the chaotic region between order and disorder." I wouldn't even dismiss the possibility of living patterns of pure information in a non-physical computing substrate.

u/chawkzero · 2 pointsr/books

This one?

Awesome book!

u/autoditactics · 2 pointsr/suggestmeabook

Here are some great books that I believe you may find helpful :)

u/mightcommentsometime · 2 pointsr/math

My favorite relaxing math book was Chaos, Making a New Science by James Gleick

And The Information by James Gleick Was pretty good too.

u/mrdevlar · 1 pointr/tf2

I'd say at the heart of our difference is two things:

(1) My experiential reality is far from deterministic. If it were, I would make my train on time every time, I would be able to control everything around me because my will would match the outcome of events I observe. It clearly does not, nor is there any likelihood that in my lifetime I will develop the mastery over myself and the universe to facilitate it. In this magical world, the weak sometimes triumph over the strong because they happened to be in the right place at the right time, where circumstance facilitates their victory.

Beyond crits, that situation happens in this game all the time. Crits are just an easy way to add additional randomness. Yet, even on a nocrit server, a bunch of weak players with a few lucky events can beat the crap out of a team of monsters. If anything, that should teach the stronger team to adapt to circumstance, that includes the possibility that you may lose a few of your key players to chance.

You cannot escape chance in a game that involves the largely arbitrary positioning of interacting objects, meterology found this out the hard way. Even if you think that everything is governed by deterministic laws.

(2) More importantly, I do not believe that the extent of human anger (or suffering in general) is entirely the result of biological processes. I agree that, when you fail to achieve what you desire in the game you will trigger a stress response. Yet, stress is not anger, it is considerably more nuanced than that. I believe that it is entirely your choice as to whether that stress eventually triggers anger. What is required to push you away from anger is not a change in the circumstances that you encounter in the game, rather mindful awareness of your own responses to what occurs. I'd further argue that such an awareness makes you a better player, as angry people make a lot of stupid mistakes and anger rarely comes at a time when you will it (see (1) ).

PS. I am really enjoying this discussion.

u/newpong · 1 pointr/ifyoulikeblank

For fiction, check out some stuff by Neal stephenson like Cryptonomicon or Anathem

For non-fiction, maybe Hyperspace by Michio Kaku or Chaos by James Gleick.

u/laststing · 1 pointr/math

in this vein, i think that gleik's chaos is written rather accessibly
http://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0143113453

u/SuperAngryGuy · 1 pointr/askscience

This book had the same profound effect on me and really helped me understand why people behave the way they do.

edit: Chaos: Making a New Science is also a good read.

u/Nemnel · 1 pointr/PublicFreakout

The best books on the history of science are mostly topic specific. Like Chaos: Making a New Science.

For philosophy of science, Thomas Kuhn is excellent. He's problematic in some ways, but he's very provocative. He actually goes into some detail about the staying power of Newtonian Gravity and the logical hoops that people would go through before GR. Also Karl Popper is great.

u/CosSecTanSin3_14159 · 1 pointr/AskPhysics

There's other good answers already, but I feel the fundamental understanding is to be found in the math. These are classic nonlinear dynamics problems, take a look at the equations of interest here, Navier-Stokes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_equations

When we solve such equations with computers, they cannot be solved in any kind of useful timeframe because they are NP-hard. The same goes for satellite tracking, weather modelling, and really modelling any chaotic behavior in a computer. So instead we estimate the answer. I worked with satellites and we used all this old fortran code for nonlinear dynamics estimations, you have to continually measure and update your model to stay within error bounds, or you will lose the satellite. And yes, satellites have been lost. If you don't know where to point your dish then you can no longer communicate with your satellite.

If you are interested in chaos, I highly recommend this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0143113453

u/dzizy · 1 pointr/occult

Not occult in the 'requires the proper colored robe' sense, more in the 'nobody fucking knows this shit' sense.

http://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0143113453/

http://www.amazon.com/Dancing-Wu-Li-Masters-Overview/dp/0060959681

http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Path-Kiyoshi-Kuromiya/dp/0312174918/

http://www.amazon.com/Oh-Thinks-You-Can-Think/dp/0394831292/

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1402754744/

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Game-Theory-Martin-Osborne/dp/0195128958/

http://www.amazon.com/Finite-Infinite-Games-Vision-Possibility/dp/B006Q9RCV4/

http://www.amazon.com/Synergetics-Further-Explorations-Geometry-Thinking/dp/0025418807/

I don't know a single thing about you, who you are, what you are looking for, why you are interested, or why you care.

This just happens to be a great excuse to let people know about a couple books I care about.

A book is 'occult' by virtue of it containing information about which most people haven't a clue.

"Occult" anything need no special handshake.

u/fyodor_mikhailovich · 1 pointr/todayilearned

I said I copied and pasted that from somewhere.

The books I used when we were taught about Chaos theory were from an Astronomy/Physic course non engineers could take and still get a Lab. For my project with Chaos, I mentioned earlier the main book I used was James Gleick, Chaos Making a New Science. https://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0143113453

The rest of your arguments... I could care less about. I'm not trying to be "deep". I am just discussing the basis for the text of the dialogue and the movie. I am always open to people educating me, but arguing bull shit is just bull shit.

u/unprintableCharacter · 1 pointr/compsci
u/cyclops1771 · 1 pointr/news

The science is not proven. the data is not 100% incontrovertible. In fact, a study in NW USA released last month states that temperature increases most likely are NOT caused by human actions. Peer reviewed and everything. Source: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/09/16/1318371111.abstract

That 0.05% IS important because Chaos Theory. Those little "margin of errors" can't be swept under the rug in science. They are actual results. You can't ignore them because they are small or because they don't fit in with your current paradigm. Read Kuhn, Structures of Scientific Revolutions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn and Gleick, Chaos Theory: Making a new science http://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0143113453/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1411582233&sr=1-1&keywords=Chaos+Theory

Those little irregularities matter. Chaos Theory says they are ALL that matters. I can't convince you, it took a number of books to convince me. You'll have to read for yourself. But, if you want to do ad hominems and troll, sorry for interfering. If you want to understand my position, read those two books and then you might have a different understanding or opinion on what science means.

Based on my opinion, science is not a consensus, it is a process for determining truth. The process can't be voted on. It is, or it is not, and your expectations of the results can and will sway your final analysis of your hypothesis.

TL;DR Science hypotheses are not voted on as "most popular". The results that don't fit may actually contain more truth than the results that concur.

u/tetondon · 0 pointsr/Bitcoin

What is it with this misconception that a higher hash rate = good?

What's the miner distribution form a year ago? 2 years ago?

http://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Making-Science-James-Gleick/dp/0143113453

If you think this is "good news," I don't know what to say.