From its original meaning as a gaping void, or the emptiness that precedes the whole of creation, chaos has taken on the exclusive meaning of confusion, pandemonium and mayhem. This definition has become the overarching word to describe any challenge to the established order; be it railway strikes or political dissent, any unexpected event is routinely described in the media and popular parlance as 'chaos'. In his incisive new study, Stuart Walton argues that this is a pitifully one-dimensional view of the world, as he looks to many of the great social, political, artistic and philosophical advances that have emerged from periods of disorder and from the refusal to think within the standard paradigms. Exploring this worldview, Walton contends that we are superstitious about states of affairs in which anything could happen because we have been taught to prefer the imposition of rules in every aspect of our lives, from our diets to our romances. Indeed, in An Excursion through Chaos he demonstrates how it is these very restrictions that are responsible for the alienation that has characterised postwar society, a state of disengagement that could have been avoided if we had taken a less fearful attitude towards the unravelling of order.

In Chaos and Cosmos, Heidi Scott integrates literary readings with contemporary ecological methods to investigate two essential and contrasting paradigms of nature that scientific ecology continues to debate: chaos and balance. Ecological literature of the Romantic and Victorian eras uses environmental chaos and the figure of the balanced microcosm as tropes essential to understanding natural patterns, and these eras were the first to reflect upon the ecological degradations of the Industrial Revolution. Chaos and Cosmos contends that the seed of imagination that would enable a scientist to study a lake as a microcosmic world at the formal, empirical level was sown by Romantic and Victorian poets who consciously drew a sphere around their perceptions in order to make sense of spots of time and place amid the globalizing modern world. This study’s interest goes beyond likening literary tropes to scientific aesthetics; it aims to theorize the interdisciplinary history of the concepts that underlie our scientific understanding of modern nature. Paradigmatic ecological ideas such as ecosystems, succession dynamics, punctuated equilibrium, and climate change are shown to have a literary foundation that preceded their status as theories in science. This book represents an elevation of the prospects of ecocriticism toward fully developed interdisciplinary potentials of literary ecology.

This book presents leading-edge research on artificial life, cellular automata, chaos theory, cognition, complexity theory, synchronisation, fractals, genetic algorithms, information systems, metaphors, neural networks, non-linear dynamics, parallel computation and synergetics. The unifying feature of this research is the tie to chaos and complexity.

This book presents new leading-edge research on artificial life, cellular automata, chaos theory, cognition, complexity theory, synchronisation, fractals, genetic algorithms, information systems, metaphors, neural networks, non-linear dynamics, parallel computation and synergetics. The unifying feature of this research is the tie to chaos and complexity.

This book presents leading-edge research on artificial life, cellular automata, chaos theory, cognition, complexity theory, synchronisation, fractals, genetic algorithms, information systems, metaphors, neural networks, non-linear dynamics, parallel computation and synergetics. The unifying feature of this research is the tie to chaos and complexity.

The editors (of the Universite et Institut National des Sciences Appliquees de Rouen, France) present six chapters exploring the application of chaos theory to such topics as the topological characterisation of attractors and the reconstruction of equations of motion from data. Specific topics include the development of a method of modelling called NARMAX (non-linear autoregressive moving average models with exogenous outputs), a summary of the work of the Centre of Applied Dynamics and Optimisation at the U. of Western Australia), time delayed feedback systems, and global modelling applications to biological data and secure communication.

Chaos theory has firmly established itself in many of the physical sciences, such as geology and fluid dynamics. This edited volume helps locate this revolutionary theory in sociology as well as the other social sciences. Doors previously closed to social scientists may be opened by this dynamic theory, which attempts to capture movement and change in exciting new ways. Editors Raymond A. Eve, Sara Horsfall, and Mary Lee, with guidance from Editorial Advisor Frederick Turner, provide a timely and well-chosen collection of articles, which first examines the emerging myths and theories surrounding the study of chaos and complexity. In the volumeÆs second part, methodological matters are considered. Finally, conceptual models and applications are presented. "Postmodern science" has provided and refined conceptual tools that have special value for the social sciences. This perceptive and thorough volume will be useful to sociologists and other social scientists interested in chaos and complexity theory.

Chaos and catastrophe theories have become one of the major frontiers in the social sciences. Brown helps to clarify this complex new technique for modeling by approaching it with the following questions: What is Chaos? How can it be measured? How are the models estimated? What is catastrophe? How is it modeled? Beginning with an explanation of the differences between deterministic and probabilistic models, Brown introduces the reader to chaotic dynamics. Other topics covered are finding settings in which chaos can be measured, estimating chaos using nonlinear least squares, and specifying catastrophe models. Finally, the author estimates a nonlinear system of equations that models catastrophe using real survey data. Researchers wanting to understand and make use of this exciting new direction in social measurement and modeling will find this book an excellent and cogent introduction.

We are in the wake of chaos - trying to make sense of the news that the universe is a far more unpredictable place than anyone ever imagined. What began with the discovery of randomness in simple physical systems - a curl of smoke, a tumble of water - has exploded into a fascination with "chaotic" models of everything from brainwaves to business cycles. Why has chaos captured so much attention? What does it do to our basic beliefs about knowledge, meaning, and our place in a suddenly turbulent world? In this provocative book, Stephen Kellert takes the first sustained look at the broad intellectual implications of chaos. Like quantum mechanics and relativity before it, chaos has an irresistible appeal as a radical new vision of reality. But how solid are its claims? Has chaos been oversold? How far can the science of chaos take us? These are just some of the intriguing questions Kellert sets out to answer. Kellert describes the challenge of chaos to traditional science - from its power to thwart the search for universal laws to its unsettling effect on such essential concepts as fact and event, cause and control. And he paints a suggestive portrait of what knowledge - with science as its source - might have to be in order to account for the profoundly counterintuitive findings of chaos. This is also the story of the coming of age of a new science. Chaotic phenomena have been observed for ages, but only recently have scientists begun to study chaos systematically. Kellert points to the deep biases for order and control that have kept the study of chaos in the background. In today's culture, however, chaos flourishes as a powerful organizing principle for those seeking to expand theboundaries of the knowable and redefine what we mean by legitimate knowledge itself. Revealing glimpses of beauty and diversity in the most routine phenomena, of order within apparent disorder, chaos is neither the new toy of media-savvy scientists and their followers nor the mystical key to a new reality. It has already. changed the way science is done. How chaos will change what we know - and what we can know - of the physical world is the heart of this wise, witty, and illuminating book.

In Chaos and Cosmos, Heidi Scott integrates literary readings with contemporary ecological methods to investigate two essential and contrasting paradigms of nature that scientific ecology continues to debate: chaos and balance. Ecological literature of the Romantic and Victorian eras uses environmental chaos and the figure of the balanced microcosm as tropes essential to understanding natural patterns, and these eras were the first to reflect upon the ecological degradations of the Industrial Revolution. Chaos and Cosmos contends that the seed of imagination that would enable a scientist to study a lake as a microcosmic world at the formal, empirical level was sown by Romantic and Victorian poets who consciously drew a sphere around their perceptions in order to make sense of spots of time and place amid the globalizing modern world. This study’s interest goes beyond likening literary tropes to scientific aesthetics; it aims to theorize the interdisciplinary history of the concepts that underlie our scientific understanding of modern nature. Paradigmatic ecological ideas such as ecosystems, succession dynamics, punctuated equilibrium, and climate change are shown to have a literary foundation that preceded their status as theories in science. This book represents an elevation of the prospects of ecocriticism toward fully developed interdisciplinary potentials of literary ecology.

This is the first monograph dealing with the applications of the Lie group analysis to the modeling equations governing internal wave propagation in the deep ocean. A new approach to describe the nonlinear interactions of internal waves in the ocean is presented. While the central idea of the book is to investigate oceanic internal waves through the prism of Lie group analysis, it is also shown for the first time that internal wave beams, representing exact solutions to the equation of motion of stratified fluid, can be found by solving the given model as invariant solutions of nonlinear equations of motion. On the illustrative basis, it is also shown that the presence of the invariant solutions makes it possible to construct a more general class of disturbances, which represent wave beams propagating in certain direction coinciding with the beam energy.This book is designed for specialists in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics, Ocean and Atmospheric Modeling, as well as for researchers, teachers and students - mathematicians and nonmathematicians - interested in methods of applied group analysis for investigating nonlinear problems in physical, engineering and natural sciences. It can also serve as a textbook on practical applications of symmetries of nonlinear differential equations for graduate students in applied mathematics, physics and engineering.

This text demonstrates the roles of statistical methods, coordinate transformations, and mathematical analysis in mapping complex, unpredictable dynamical systems. Written by a well-known authority in the field, it employs practical examples and analogies, rather than theorems and proofs, to characterize the benefits and limitations of modeling tools. 1991 edition.

Honorable Mention, 1998, category of Computer Science, Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition presented by the Association of American Publishers, Inc. In this book Gary William Flake develops in depth the simple idea that recurrent rules can produce rich and complicated behaviors. Distinguishing "agents" (e.g., molecules, cells, animals, and species) from their interactions (e.g., chemical reactions, immune system responses, sexual reproduction, and evolution), Flake argues that it is the computational properties of interactions that account for much of what we think of as "beautiful" and "interesting." From this basic thesis, Flake explores what he considers to be today's four most interesting computational topics: fractals, chaos, complex systems, and adaptation. Each of the book's parts can be read independently, enabling even the casual reader to understand and work with the basic equations and programs. Yet the parts are bound together by the theme of the computer as a laboratory and a metaphor for understanding the universe. The inspired reader will experiment further with the ideas presented to create fractal landscapes, chaotic systems, artificial life forms, genetic algorithms, and artificial neural networks.

As the head of the theory group at Los Alamos, Hans A. Bethe played a central role in the dawn of the Nuclear Age. In the 50 years since, he has played an equally central role in the debate over the use and control of this new power. This volume collects together Bethe's best essays on the bomb, arms control, nuclear power and astrophysics. It also includes his reflections on science and morality and his comments on five fellow physicists. Of interest to physicists, particularly those working in nuclear physics and astrophysics, historians and philosophers of science, science policy makers, environmentalists, those concerned with disarmament and the role of science in society, and general science readers.

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