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 international 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.

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

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 collection of fifteen research papers explores the implications of chaos and complexity in physical, chemical, and biological systems for philosophical and theological issues regarding God's action in the world. It resulted from the second of five international research conferences being co-sponsored by the Vatican Observatory, Rome, and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, Berkeley. The overarching goal is to contribute to constructive theology as it engages current research in the natural sciences and to investigate the philosophical and theological elements in ongoing theoretical research in the natural sciences.

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.

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.

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.

Volume IV continues the author's odyssey on l-D cellular automata as chronicled in Volumes I, II and III, by uncovering a novel quasi-ergodicity phenomenon involving orbits meandering among omega-limit orbits of complex (group 5) and hyper (group 6) Bernoulli rules. This discovery is embellished with analytical formulas characterizing the fractal properties of characteristic functions, as well as explicit formulas for generating colorful and pedagogically revealing isomorphic basin tree diagrams. Many new results were derived and proved by uncovering subtle symmetries endowed by various subsets of the 256 Boolean cubes. For the first time, rigorous analyses were used to identify 67, out off 256, local rules whose asymptotic behaviors consist of robust period-l orbits. The highlight of this continuing odyssey is the discovery of an isolated period-3240 Isle of Eden hidden among the dense omega-limit orbits of Wolfram's remarkable "random number generating" rule 30. This is the largest gem known to-date and readers are challenged to uncover even larger ones.

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.

Chaos is considered as one of the most important concepts in modern science. It originally appeared only in computer simulation (the famous Lorenz equation of 1963), but this changed with the introduction of Chua's oscillator (1986) - a simple electronic circuit with the ability to generate a vast range of chaotic behaviors. With Chua's circuit, chaos became a physical phenomenon, readily understood and represented in mathematical language. Yet, even so, it is still difficult for the non-specialist to appreciate the full variety of behaviors that the system can produce.This book aims to bridge the gap. A gallery of nearly 900 "chaotic attractors" - some generated by Chua's physical circuit, the majority through computer simulation of the circuit and its generalizations - are illustrated as 3D color images, time series and fast Fourier transform algorithms. For interested researchers, also presented is the information necessary to replicate the behaviors and images. Finally, how the fractal richness can be plied to artistic ends in generating music and interesting sounds is shown; some examples are included in the DVD-ROM which comes with the book.The contents have also appeared in the International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos (2007).

This book is the first monograph devoted exclusively to strange nonchaotic attractors (SNA), recently discovered objects with a special kind of dynamical behavior between order and chaos in dissipative nonlinear systems under quasiperiodic driving. A historical review of the discovery and study of SNA, mathematical and physically-motivated examples, and a review of known experimental studies of SNA are presented. The main focus is on the theoretical analysis of strange nonchaotic behavior by means of different tools of nonlinear dynamics and statistical physics (bifurcation analysis, Lyapunov exponents, correlations and spectra, renormalization group). The relations of the subject to other fields of physics such as quantum chaos and solid state physics are also discussed.

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.

http://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/0323

This text is one of the first to treat vector calculus using differential forms in place of vector fields and other outdated techniques. Geared towards students taking courses in multivariable calculus, this innovative book aims to make the subject more readily understandable. Differential forms unify and simplify the subject of multivariable calculus, and students who learn the subject as it is presented in this book should come away with a better conceptual understanding of it than those who learn using conventional methods.