Does God play Dice? The New Mathematics of Chaos

Второе издание книги, перевод первого издания которой уже имеется в библиотеке (https://read_bk.is/b/588259). Вот фрагмент из предисловия ко второму изданию: If you already own the first edition and are wondering whether this one is different enough to be worth buying, you should either read this bit or thumb through Chapters 14–17 where most of the new stuff lives. If not, just buy it now, OK? You can decide whether to read the preface when you get the book home. ... This new edition of Does God Play Dice? differs from its predecessor mainly by including new material on applications. I've left the original edition virtually untouched: nothing has happened since it was published to require major surgery. There are three completely new chapters inserted near the end. The first is on prediction in chaotic systems, which is perfectly possible, depending on what you want to predict; it also discusses various related issues. I've included several new applications, ranging from the pulsations of variable stars to quality control in the spring-making industry. The second new chapter is about the control of chaotic systems, a potential source of practical applications and a case study in what advantages accrue when you learn how to use chaos instead of trying to pretend that it doesn't exist. Among the applications here are ways to steer artificial satellites more economically, and work heading in the direction of intelligent heart pacemakers. The third new chapter is much more speculative. It is an attempt to explain how the concept of chaos might lead to a new answer to Einstein's famous question, the title of this book. Einstein was worrying about quantum mechanics, which is generally held to be irreducibly probabilistic. Is it possible that the apparent randomness of the quantum world is actually deterministic chaos? Would the course of physics have been different if chaos had been discovered before quantum mechanics? In 1989 there wasn't a great deal to say about these questions, but today there is. There is one quite specific proposal in the scientific literature: speculative, but based on solid discoveries, some of them very new. It's a fascinating story, and all of the ingredients are good science: it is only the overall mix that is speculative. And if you don't speculate, you don't accumulate. I have also brought the earlier chapters up to date. That at least some instances of turbulence in fluids are due to chaos is now absolutely certain. There are new results on the dynamics of the solar system, which it seems will not survive in its present form for much more than another billion years or so. The universe is clumpier on even larger scales than we thought. Chaos in at least some ecosystems is close to being an established fact. Fractal geometry has acquired serious commercial uses. Mathematical technique has advanced to the point that we can now prove, in all rigour, that the model set up by the meteorologist Edward Lorenz definitely does lead to chaos. This is bad news for those stalwarts of orthodoxy who maintained that the appearance of chaos was due to computer error, but good news for the logical underpinnings of nonlinear dynamics. Finally, a companion to chaos theory has now appeared, known as complexity theory. Chaos theory tells us that simple systems can exhibit complex behaviour; complexity theory tells us that complex systems can exhibit simple ‘emergent’ behaviour. No discussion of chaos nowadays would be complete without some mention of complexity theory, so I've put it in the final chapter. Complexity theory definitely is controversial, but it brings a welcome breath of fresh air to a sackful of stuffy overblown old-fashioned linear theories. I'm absolutely convinced that over the next few decades the kind of thinking towards which complexity theorists are currently groping will turn out to be of fundamental importance in nearly every area of scientific activity. I don't think complexity theory holds the answers – yet – but I do think it offers a much more interesting angle on the questions, which in turn suggests new ways to look for the answers.