In the 1950s, scientists were highly optimistic about the possibilities of predicting – even manipulating – the weather. This hope lay in new computer technology. The good news is that this is not another book about the history of computing, from the Gutenberg press to the Macintosh. There are more than enough books on that topic. So, exactly what is it about? It's hard to be succinct about that. It might be better to offer a listing of broad topics covered. Different systems can behave in the same way, caring not at all for the details of a system's constituent atoms. FA ID: NYC98FA047". National Transportation Safety Board. US Government. Archived from the original on 17 October 2014 . Retrieved 12 October 2014. Shlesinger, Michael F. (March 1988). "Book review: Chaos: Making a new science". Journal of Statistical Physics. 50 (5–6): 1285–1286. Bibcode: 1988JSP....50.1285S. doi: 10.1007/BF01019170. ISSN 0022-4715. S2CID 122110686.

Here’s the key message: Meteorologist Edward Lorenz became the intellectual father of chaos theory after discovering the unpredictability of weather.The book is divided as the title describes into three sections - one about the history of information, one about the theory that developed to explain it, and finally a look at the flood of it that we are now experiencing. Throughout is that wonderful sense of excitement, discovery and adventurous thinking that Asimov was so good at relating.

Telephony reduced the barriers to telecommunication by reducing the middle man, saved money for businesses by reducing the need for messengers and increasing the speed of messages. Telephony also drove further information technology innovations. Phone companies (or THE phone company at the time) devoted considerable resources to dealing with problems of long distance transmission of voice information over inherently "lossy" copper wires. Sifting meaningful signal from distance-induced static and noise became of focus of some particularly talented engineers. Analysis of this problem lead to mathematical abstractions as they tried to reduce "information" to the lowest possible common denominator. How small of a signal can carry a message? How can "message" be defined mathematically? The idea of the "bit" became common and the field of information theory began to take off. It had existed before, but it had never flowered in the way that modern communications forced it to. Claude Shannon is a central figure in the development of modern information theory and his revolutionary ideas are quoted extensively throughout the book. Parallel developments in information theory occurred with Alan Turing who developed the theoretical basis for computing before any of the hardware existed. Simple and determined (in every detail) systems can behave in an extremely complicated way, apparently random and almost unpredictable. I realised how much I was enjoying the book when I found myself twiddling my thumbs one lunch hour at work and decided to plot a simple bifurcation chart! Came out pretty nicely for something done off the cuff! In each field, also, the initial work was most often either resisted or ignored. Precisely because chaos was popping up all over, with just a few people in each of many different scientific fields, it was easy for scientists in any field to notice a paper or presentation, note the fact that is was completely different from the methods, logic, math that had relevance for their own work, that much of the work was in fact being done in other fields--and dismiss it. For new doctoral students, there were no mentors in chaos theory, no jobs, no journals devoted to chaos theory. It completely upended ideas about how the natural world worked. It was heady, exciting--and much harder to explain than to demonstrate. Much of what the first generation of chaos scientists did is incredibly easy to demonstrate with a laptop computer today--but most of these chaos pioneers were working with handheld calculators, mainframe computers with dump terminals and limited and unreliable access for something so peripheral to the institution's perceived mission, computers whose only output device was a plotter. distances via a tonal drum language with built in redundancy. I loved reading about Babbage and his calculating machine, and to think about it as a kind of steam-punk calculator fantasy world of the future. I loved reading about people decrying the telegraph and the telephone as technologies that will ruin humanity. And to read about the shortening of telegraph messages to save time and money, with phrases like wyegfef which stands for 'will you exchange gold for eastern funds?' which is interesting because here we are in 2012In fairness, there was a long gap where I put this book down after having read the first half, so I recognize that I lost the continuity of the narrative. And maybe, just maybe (highly doubtful!!)I'm just not smart enough to get it. Still, a whole lot more could have been done to illustrate the application and implications of the subject. I also didn't care for the tone of the brief profiles of the various physicists and mathematicians - it felt like name-dropping to me. The book covers chaos theory under the lens of four themes: sensitive dependence on initial conditions, self-similarity, universality, and nonlinearity. [5]

In other words, even for populations with can be modeled with a simple formula, the math predicts that there will be occasional booms and crashes INDEPENDENT of any external influences. To put it another way, bald eagle populations might crash every once in a while, seemingly at random, whether anyone invents DDT or not- just because of the chaotic nature of how the universe works. (I am not trying to defend DDT, just using it as an example). The book could have benefited from a lecture style presentation, with clear chapter introductions and summaries, so that I could see how it all fit together, not to mention what year he was currently talking about. Frankly a visual Timeline would have done wonders. If you are into that sort of thing, then this book will be a fun read for you. I found it extremely fascinating.

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Pepinsky, Hal (Spring 1990). "Reproducing Violence: A Review Essay". Social Justice. 17 (1 (39)): 155–172. ISSN 1043-1578. JSTOR 29766530.