james gleick genius the life and science of richard feynman

It's now apparent that this complex dance between coherence and instability, between the macroscopic and the microscopic, drives many of nature's most interesting phenomena, from the branching of blood vessels into smaller ones, to how particles of smoke curl around each other, to the way a snowflake's shape reflects its journey through the atmosphere. The feedback loops in these systems would magnify initial discrepancies over time, but they would also perform a sort of self-correction, giving rise to repeated patterns and patterns-within-patterns - similar, like the shape of clouds, but never exactly the same. Yet, as the age of computers dawned, it became clear that the 'noise' in many natural systems wasn't error at all, but held its own elusive underlying order. Living in the age of slide rules and tables (or before), they can't really be blamed for focusing on phenomena that were predictable, linear, and led to stable outcomes, and ignoring those that seemed too noisy, erratic, and error-prone to be represented with an equation. It's an overworn cliche by now, but one that still gets to the heart of a quality of nature that scientists and mathematicians prior to the 20th century didn't really grasp. Still a consciousness-expanding introductionĬhaos, the concept, is often explained in terms of a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world, which sets off a long chain of consequences leading to rain falling in another part of the world. Overall a great book for people who like physics, math, theory, and thought. The book doesn't just introduce the people who's research led to choas theory it takes one through the basics of thier experiements and results. I enjoyed the real world examples and the journey through much of the research that led up to choas theory.

Maybe one or two times however, it wasn't really needed to keep up with the flow of the story. Overall, there were not too many parts where I could not keep up with the math. but that was only about three times during the nine hour book. I dealt with this by looking them on online later. As with any audio math book, there are some parts where you might have trouble visualizing the shapes being described. It introduces one to the culture of Math and the real world applications of physics. It helps to show what types of problems they work on and how they think as they attack the problems. I'm a math major and a calculus two student and this book has helped me to get inside the thinking of a Mathematician.

I had no idea that this was a book about both math and physics.

James gleick genius the life and science of richard feynman