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Full Description
The study of chaotic systems has become a major scientific pursuit in recent years, shedding light on the apparently random behaviour observed in fields as diverse as climatology and mechanics. InThe Essence of Chaos Edward Lorenz, one of the founding fathers of Chaos and the originator of its seminal concept of the Butterfly Effect, presents his own landscape of our current understanding of the field.
Lorenz presents everyday examples of chaotic behaviour, such as the toss of a coin, the pinball's path, the fall of a leaf, and explains in elementary mathematical strms how their essentially chaotic nature can be understood. His principal example involved the construction of a model of a board sliding down a ski slope. Through this model Lorenz illustrates chaotic phenomena and the related concepts of bifurcation and strange attractors. He also provides the context in which chaos can be related to the similarly emergent fields of nonlinearity, complexity and fractals.
As an early pioneer of chaos, Lorenz also provides his own story of the human endeavour in developing this new field. He describes his initial encounters with chaos through his study of climate and introduces many of the personalities who contributed early breakthroughs. His seminal paper, "Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wing in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?" is published for the first time.
Contents
Preface; 1. Glimpses of Chaos 2. It Only Looks Random 3. Pinballs and Butterflies 4. It Ain't Got Rhythm 5. Zeroing in on Chaos 6. A Journey Into Chaos 7. Chaos in Action 8. The Heart of Chaos 9. Chaos of Another Species 10. In and Out of Chaos 11.Our Chaotic Weather 12. Prediction: A Tale of Two Fluids 13. Meteorology: Two Tales of One Fluid 14. The Unperformable Experiment 15. Voices from Dishpans 16. The Five-Million Variable Dynamic System 17. The Consequences 18. Encounters With Chaos: Prologue 19. Recognition 20. In Limbo 21. Searching 22. The Strange Attractor 23. The Ubiquity of Chaos 24. Make Your Own Chaos 25. Is Randomness Chaos? 26. What Else is Chaos? 27. Nonlinearity 28. Complexity 29. Fractality 30. Appendices: The Butterfly Effect; Mathematical Excursions; A Brief Dynamical Systems Glossary; Bibliography; Index
