Deep Simplicity – John Gribbin ***

There’s something infuriating about chaos theory. It’s a tease. It provokes you to excitement with all its promise of explaining all those complex (yet somehow simple)phenomena like weather and the stock exchange… then it fails to deliver because you can’t really do anything with it.

There are already two great popular science books on chaos. James Gleick’s book Chaos not only brought chaos theory to the popular audience in a powerfully gripping way, it almost defined the genre of crossover popular science books – books in a scientific topic that appealed outside the narrow group of science enthusiasts. The follow-up book, The Collapse of Chaos by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart goes beyond chaos theory to take in complexity, simplicity and the impact on the real world.

So what’s left? John Gribbin, I think, was lured by the siren song of chaos. It just seems so natural that there ought to be more “chaos and X” books – in this case, chaos, simplicity and life – that it’s easy to ignore the fact there really isn’t much more to say.

Even so, it starts well, and it seemed as if Gribbin was going to give us an enjoyable ride through chaos and the real world, but once he gets into mathematical explanations he gets bogged down and frankly doesn’t do himself justice in putting across what is going on to the general audience – in places it’s downright boring.

There are a few insights here, especially on the overlap between chaos, complexity and the formation of life – as many others have pointed out, DNA is much more a recipe than a blueprint, and the wonder of complexity is the way a very simple set of repeated instructions can result in a complex formation. And there’s some interesting bits towards the end about using complexity effects to detect life on remote planets. But the combination of rather poor exposition of the mathematical aspects of the theory and the feeling that there’s not a lot that’s new makes it difficult to get too enthusiastic.

There’s still something very frustrating about a theory that says “this is why things are like this” but then won’t let you predict anything based on the theory. And frustration is what readers may well end up with. Stick with the classics.

Paperback:

Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you

Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...

How to Keep a Plane in the Sky - Alex Davies ****

If there's one big gap in the science writing sphere, it's popular engineering (you can quibble over whether engineering is science, but where else would you put popular engineering?). Alex Davies does the field a real service with this insightful introduction to the world of test engineering. The concept is simple. If we build something and sell it, we need to test it to make sure that it won't fail in a way that's dangerous to the consumer. The most obvious example is airliners, which feature at some length, but this applies to everything from cuddly toys to hair straighteners: someone needs to predict what could go wrong and to put the product through its paces to see if it will survive under any reasonable circumstances. When Davies is telling a story of test engineering in action, the book is a delight. He opens with the way that real bears are used to test if bears can get into coolers and trash cans - and the impressive ways these animals can circumvent human in...

On the Equality of All Things - Carlo Rovelli ****

There is a wide gulf between the worldviews of physicists and philosophers. Many physicists present a rather sweetly naive, child-like view of the world, where philosophers bring a distinctly more adult, cynical tone. This being the case, it can be a little worrying when a physicist dips a toe into the philosophical mire. Infamously, in The Grand Design , Stephen Hawking and co-author Leonard Mlodinow told us that philosophy was now dead because science could deal with anything it had previously been needed for. Thankfully, Carlo Rovelli is not trying to do away with philosophy, though it has to be said that when he veers into the topic that physicist's naivety can make it feel like the philosophising of an earnest eighteen-year-old. Take the opening paragraph, which tells us 'electrons and minds, stones and laws, judgements and galaxies do not essentially differ in nature from one another. They are notions that illuminate each other'. I almost expected a Pink Floyd soundtr...

Search This Blog