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Chaos for Beginners
by Ziauddin Sardar and Iwona Abrams

It is always a hard job trying to explain difficult subjects in an easy manner. So it is with Chaos Theory. While the author and artist for this book tries to keep Chaos Theory simple, it was still tough going but you will get some appreciation of what it is and how it is being used today.

Chaos Theory, as I understand it, is a theory that tries to take into account how the real world works. In the real world, objects like water don't usually flow in a nice stream from a tap (there is turbulence) and the weather cannot be predicted past a few days. Factors like sensitivity to initial conditions (like a butterfly flapping its wings) can make the end result completely different. And that is just a small part of Chaos Theory.

There are various different types of Chaos that is covered in this book: among them include nonlinear dynamic systems (dynamics of population growth between predator and prey), fractals (like the Mandelbrot set), strange attractors, turbulence, bifurcations, self-organising systems and Complexity Theory. The book also briefly covers the applications of Chaos Theory in various fields like weather forecasting, economics (the stock market), biology and astronomy (the chaotic orbits of planets and satellites).

As you can see, the book covers a lot of ground which means it can devote only a few pages of explanation for each topic. Because of this, the explanation of some topics, like bifurcation, phase space and fractal dimensions, may well leave the reader puzzled. I also found some the diagrams and drawings a bit puzzling. Fortunately, I had read James Gleick's book, Chaos, which explains some of the topics better. But this is because Gleick had more pages for explanations.

If you want to get a rough and quick idea of what Chaos Theory is about, you can read this book. But be aware that Chaos Theory itself is a huge field and you should not depend on this book alone to give you a good idea of what it is about. Fortunately, the book provides a reasonable bibliography of books about Chaos Theory that you can then look up to get a better idea of what it is about and how it can be used in real-life situations.

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Chaos for Beginners by Ziauddin Sardar and Iwona Abrams

Chaos for Beginners
by Ziauddin Sardar and Iwona Abrams