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Why do traffic jams seem to happen for no
apparent reason? Can major earthquakes be predicted? Why
does the stock market have its ups and downs? How do species
evolve? Where do galaxies come from? What is the origin
of life on Earth? What if all these questions had a single
answer?
Over the past two decades, no field of scientific
inquiry has had a more striking impact across a wide array
of disciplines -- from biology to physics, computing to
meteorology -- than that known as chaos and complexity,
the study of complex systems. Now astrophysicist John Gribbin
draws on his expertise to explore, in sparkling prose that
cutting-edge science, the principles behind chaos and complexity.
He reveals the remarkable ways these two revolutionary theories
have been applied over the last twenty years to explain
all sorts of phenomena -- from weather patterns to mass
extinctions.
Grounding these paradigm-shifting ideas
in their historical context, Gribbin also traces their development
from Newton and Darwin to Lorenz, Prigogine, and Lovecock,
demonstrating how -- far from overturning all that has gone
before -- chaos and complexity are the triumphant extensions
of simple scientific laws. More astonishing, he shows how
chaos and complexity permeate the universe on every scale,
governing the evolution of life and galaxies alike. As profound
as it is provocative, Deep Simplicity takes us to
the brink of understanding life itself.
John Gribbin trained as an astrophysicist
at Cambridge University and is currently Visiting Fellow
in Astronomy at the University of Sussex. His many books
include In Search of Schrodinger's Cat, Stardust,
Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality,
Fitzroy (with his wife, Mary Gribbin), and The Scientists.
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