Skip to main content

Sync: the emerging science of spontaneous order – Steven Strogatz ****

Every now and then I read a book written by a real scientist that makes me think “Wow! I remember why I wanted to work in science when I was at university.” This is one of them. Like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time it is a fascinating insight into the mind of a working scientist and mathematician, and that makes it a treasure.
In essence, the question Sync explores is “why (and how) do things synchronize?” Why do fireflies in some parts of the world flash in unison? How do the cells that control the rate of the heart work together? Why did the millennium bridge go all wobbly? What is a Josephson junction, and what does it show us about synchronization? What is happening when we talk about six degrees of separation or a [Kevin] Bacon number?
One of the great things about the book is its diversity. At times you will be in the lab with the author, seeing how a fundamental new piece of research got started. At others you will be looking with him at something completely different, like the moment when the then graduate student Brian Josephson stood up to a Nobel laureate and challenged him to think differently. [Strogatz has to be warmly applauded for remembering that Josephson has a remarkable mind - most of the scientific community has written Josephson off, despite his Nobel prize, for daring to consider possibilities that most scientists dismiss without thinking about. Josephson may not be right, but the attitude of his peers has been appalling.]
It’s interesting to compare this book with another recent title, Critical Mass by Philip Ball. Although on a different topic, there is strong overlap between the two books, and each is covering a broad-spanning (if rather diffuse) concept that pulls together a wide range of fields. Frankly, this book is streets ahead of Ball’s. Firstly it is concise – Strogatz does not fall for the lure of bloat. His book is half the length of Ball’s and has more content. Secondly it’s more of a popular science book, even though Strogatz has less writing credentials. This is because you get a much better feel for people – not just the people directly involved with Strogatz – in Sync.
Sync comes within a whisker of our coveted 5 stars. There are only a couple of small reasons it doesn’t quite make it. One is the topic itself – like many cross-functional topics, it is difficult to pin down. It’s harder to see the point of it than many scientific subjects. It’s not that there aren’t applications, but it still feels very diffuse. The second reason is that, though Strogatz does a good job, it is obvious he isn’t a professional writer. His analogies are sometimes quite hard to follow and his explanations of the more complex aspects of the theory not entirely satisfying.
This isn’t to say Strogatz is a bad writer. He comes into his own, strangely, when he’s off the technical (of course, making the technical accessible is the hardest part of popular science writing). When he’s dealing with anecdotes or a non technical discussion like that on six degrees of separation he’s brilliant. Perhaps the most obvious parallel is with Richard Feynman’s combination of (occasionally impenetrable but always exciting) technical excellence and ability to tell a story – and that can’t be bad!

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you  
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - Henry Gee *****

In writing this book, Henry Gee had a lot to live up to. His earlier title  The Accidental Species was a superbly readable and fascinating description of the evolutionary process leading to Homo sapiens . It seemed hard to beat - but he has succeeded with what is inevitably going to be described as a tour-de-force. As is promised on the cover, we are taken through nearly 4.6 billion years of life on Earth (actually rather more, as I'll cover below). It's a mark of Gee's skill that what could have ended up feeling like an interminable list of different organisms comes across instead as something of a pager turner. This is helped by the structuring - within those promised twelve chapters everything is divided up into handy bite-sized chunks. And although there certainly are very many species mentioned as we pass through the years, rather than feeling overwhelming, Gee's friendly prose and careful timing made the approach come across as natural and organic.  There was a w
Post a Comment
Read more

Michael D. Gordin - Four Way Interview

Michael D. Gordin is a historian of modern science and a professor at Princeton University, with particular interests in the physical sciences and in science in Russia and the Soviet Union. He is the author of six books, ranging from the periodic table to early nuclear weapons to the history of scientific languages. His most recent book is On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience (Oxford University Press). Why history of science? The history of science grabbed me long before I knew that there were actual historians of science out there. I entered college committed to becoming a physicist, drawn in by the deep intellectual puzzles of entropy, quantum theory, and relativity. When I started taking courses, I came to understand that what really interested me about those puzzles were not so much their solutions — still replete with paradoxes — but rather the rich debates and even the dead-ends that scientists had taken to trying to resolve them. At first, I thought this fell under
Post a Comment
Read more

Regeneration - Paul Hawken **

This is a really big book. I don't mean big in the sense of important, but physically enormous for what it is - it's roughly the size of a children's annual, though a lot thicker. Interestingly, the format appears to be a Paul Hawken speciality - he did it with his previous title, Drawdown ,  though that was far less glossy. Paul Hawken's aim is to put forward a solution to climate change driven from humans rather than from the science. The tag line on the back of the book reads 'The climate crisis is not at science problem. It is a human problem.' And that itself is a problem. It's not that climate change isn't a human problem, but rather that it's both a human problem and a science problem - requiring human and science-based solutions. But the approach taken in this book is anything but scientific. It's a bit like saying the Covid-19 pandemic is a human problem, not a science problem. The pandemic is indeed a human problem, but if we'd tr
Post a Comment
Read more