"Sync" by Steven Strogatz

Fireflies synchronize their flashes for miles and miles along a river bank. Applauding humans synchronize their claps. The Millennium Bridge in London was almost overwhelmed as hundreds of people developed synchronized staggering. Electrons synchronize their waves to enable superconductivity.

This book is about how oscillating systems can spontaneously synchronize. That sounds abstruse, difficult and rather boring. Strogatz makes it exciting. He writes about a wide range of topics, explaining any necessary maths carefully and without equations, and spices his stories up by writing about the often eccentric mathematicians and scientists with whom he has worked, from the father of Cybernetics who became so obsessed with a particular graph that he promoted it even after he had discovered that the evidence for it had been mistaken to the Nobel-prize winning physicist who now studies telepathy. I loved the story about when he was having a meal with Alan Alda, the instantly recognizable MASH star, in the MIT canteen and a young student came up and asked them whether he was Professor Strogatz because he just had to say how much he loved his book. They were talking about fads and tipping points and Strogatz mentions that the latest fads in science are all c-words: cybernetics, catastrophe theory, chaos and complexity. He thinks sync is behind them all!

This book is so well written that I understood about Bose-Einstein condensates, quantum tunnelling and strange attractors. That is impressive.

But I also learned about sleep and insomnia and phase changes and tipping points and fads and raster plots and incoherence and small world networks and cascades and brain waves and epilepsy and pendulums and power grids and Zhabotinsky soup and the Josephson Effect and SQUIDs and rioting and foot and mouth.

Wow!

Other great books in this area include:

• Six degrees about small world networks by Duncan Watts who worked with Steven Strogatz
• At Home in the Universe by Stuart Kauffman about fitness landscapes
• How Nature Works by Per Bak about sandpiles and self organized criticality; an excellent explanation of complexity science
• Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin which is a brilliant introduction to this whole field
• Smart swarm by Peter Miller
• The Information by James Gleick although his Chaos (not reviewed on this blog) is perhaps better

Other books not reviewed on this blog on this topic include:

• The Wisdom of Crowds 
• Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell about fads
• Ubiquity which is brilliant about fractals and power laws
• Critical mass by Philip Ball which is a brilliant explanation about phase changes

Very readable and very important. September 2015; 289 pages

"At Home in the Universe" by Stuart Kauffman

Kauffman is a pioneering complexity scientist and this book endeavours to show how life could have emerged from a sufficiently large and diverse collection of molecules with autocatalysis. Despite being unable to point to an example where some scientist has successfully replicated the necessary reactions, his arguments are compelling. Complex networks of individual agents can give rise to emergent phenomena: life, consciousness and more. There is no need for a designer or an intelligence or indeed any external influence; you don't even need the agents to be purposeful or (in economic terms) rational. Given the right conditions of complexity (and in Kauffman's models, rather more than in those of Per Bak, there is a degree of tuning required to ensure that the parameters give rise to critical sustainability rather than subcritical inert stability or supercritical chaos), emergence will, er, emerge.

The phenomenon of self-organization means that systems not in thermodynamic equilibrium will create what Kauffman calls "order for free". The second law of thermodynamics continues, of course, to apply to systems in equilibrium, systems that are closed to inputs and outputs of matter and energy, in which entropy or disorder inevitably increases but Kauffman's systems are ones through which matter and energy flow.

Kauffman clearly finds these exciting. He keeps repeating his discovery that we are not the random products of chance, rather we are the inevitable results of the way the universe works. He is right, of course: this is a revolutionary thesis as important as the Copernican paradigm shift or Darwin's Natural Selection. But this is where I began to find the work a little muddled. His lyrical descriptions of the desert in bloom are presumably meant for the general reader but at the same time there is a lot of technical details about his theoretical models. On the other hand, when I try to understand more deeply these same models I am frustrated by gaps in the explanations. For example, he states a formula S = lnG and I think I know what he means by G but I am not certain; he is not clear. He tells us on page 163 that pleuromona has between 500 to 800 genes but on page 42 it is between "a few hundred to about a thousand". He explains that some systems can jump beyond the 'correlation length' of a fitness landscape but he never tells us how to measure this length. Perhaps this is just me not being clever enough or picking too many nits but a few minor changes could have really helped me understand this work.

This is an important and ground-breaking book. It would benefit from slightly better editing. August 2015; 304 pages.

Other works on this exciting topic:

• Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin which is an immensely readable and interesting overview of this area and similar non-equilibrium systems and 100% recommended
• Emergence: from chaos to order and Complexity: a very short introduction, both by John Holland, one of the leading experts in the field
• Ubiquity by Mark Buchanan
• How Nature Works by Per Bak, another expert who can really write
• Six degrees about small world networks by Duncan Watts who worked with Steven Strogatz
• Smart swarm by Peter Miller
• The Information by James Gleick although his Chaos (not reviewed on this blog) is perhaps better
• sync by Steven Strogatz

Other books not reviewed on this blog on this topic include:

• The Wisdom of Crowds 
• Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell about fads
• Ubiquity which is brilliant about fractals and power laws
• Critical mass by Philip Ball which is a brilliant explanation about phase changes

"How nature works" by Per Bak

This book is subtitled The Science of Self-Organized Criticality and explains the new discipline of Complexity Theory, the the process making it distinct from Chaos Theory.

Per Bak is a critical (pun not intended) researcher in this field, having been one of the first to devise the famous sandpile experiments in which grains of sand are dropped one by one onto a pile of sand and the size of the subsequent avalanches recorded. From here to theoretical models of ridiculous simplicity modelled on desk top computers which provide results which closely match phenomena as diverse as:

• The distribution of earthquake size
• The distributions of extinctions within the fossil record
• Learning
• Economics
• Traffic jams

The suggestion is that many systems evolve into a position of 'Self Organized Criticality'. At this point small external events will trigger adjustments of the system, some of which will be unnoticeably small and some of which will be enormous. Key insights are:

• That you do not need to postulate an external trigger for a catastrophe, systems such as the world's ecosystem or a the world's stock markets are always on the edge of catastrophe anyway so that a very small trigger can create a massive landslide (but normally doesn't, of course)
• That these systems are very large so that you need to consider the entire ecosystem of the world (which might include the atmosphere - life creates oxygen - and the oceans and the landscape) or the entire geological system of the world (earthquakes and plate tectonics etc) or the economics systems of the world or an entire brain etc
• That these systems may be hierarchical such that complex astrophysical systems give rise to complex geological systems which give rise to complex biological systems (eg life) which give rise to complex ecological systems etc etc.

This was a fascinating book, mostly very readable, which gives insight into this fascinating new science. A slight criticism is that the bibliography appears quite selective and some of the researchers mentioned in the text do not appear, making it difficult to access their original work.

July 2015; 198 pages

Other books covering this interesting topic include:

• Deep Simplicity by John Gribbin which is an immensely readable and interesting overview of this area and similar non-equilibrium systems and 100% recommended
• Emergence: from chaos to order and Complexity: a very short introduction, both by John Holland, one of the leading experts in the field
• Ubiquity by Mark Buchanan
• At Home in the Universe by Stuart Kauffman, the inventor of the NK landscape model
• Six degrees about small world networks by Duncan Watts
• sync by Steven Strogatz
• Smart swarm by Peter Miller
• The Information by James Gleick although his Chaos (not reviewed on this blog) is perhaps better

Other books not reviewed on this blog on this topic include:

• The Wisdom of Crowds 
• Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell about fads
• Ubiquity which is brilliant about fractals and power laws
• Critical mass by Philip Ball which is a brilliant explanation about phase changes

"Complexity: A very short introduction" by John H Holland

It was always going to be difficult to express a difficult new science in 90 pages. Mostly, Holland succeeds. There are moments when he repeats himself, especially using the same examples more than once, which is obvious in such a short book. There are moments when he seems to spend too much space explaining a relatively concept and then compresses something more difficult. I was left high and dry when he claimed that there were 40,320 distinct arrangements of 5 balls having 2 colours in 3 locations (and he then said the maths was simple but tedious and he wouldn't give it so I don't know how he got it because I didn't get it!). More seriously, there were bits that didn't quite work. For example, on page 8 he discusses von Neumann's cellular automaton and claims that it is capable of reproduction; he refers to figure 1. Figure 1 is on page 9 and is entitled Laws ('Game of Life'). This shows a snapshot of the Game of Life created by the uncredited John Conway; worse, it shows the pattern known as a glider which 'moves' across the screen. There are patterns the 'breed' gliders but these aren't shown. On page 67 he offers 9 pictures of patterns of urns you can get if you move one ball from the starting position, but one finishing position is the same as the start.

Despite these little niggles, Holland managed to explain complex systems in terms that I could mostly understand using Maths that I was happy with. But I teach Physics. I don't think this is for the general reader. And I would have liked a little more explanation of some of the more difficult ideas.

An easier to read introduction to some of these ideas is John Gribbin's Deep Simplicity.

Holland also wrote Emergence: from chaos to order.

"Deep simplicity" by John Gribbin

Gribbin explains complexity and chaos theory and shows how it applies to everything including the creation of life.



It was my first introduction to complexity theory and it is written by a master of readability.

It contains so many important topics. I had never realised that Alan Turing, after inventing the computer and winning the war, as told by Andrew Hodges in Enigma, had then kicked off the science of morphogenesis, explaining how you can get different species by switching on the same genes at different stages of gestation.

This book was my wonderful introduction to so many others dealing with the sciences of chaos and complexity:

• Six degrees about small world networks by Duncan Watts 
• sync by Steven Strogatz
• At Home in the Universe by Stuart Kauffman about fitness landscapes
• How Nature Works by Per Bak about sandpiles and self organized criticality; an excellent explanation of complexity science
• Smart swarm by Peter Miller
• The Information by James Gleick although his Chaos (not reviewed on this blog) is perhaps better

Other books not reviewed on this blog on this topic include:

• The Wisdom of Crowds 
• Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell about fads
• Ubiquity which is brilliant about fractals and power laws
• Critical mass by Philip Ball which is a brilliant explanation about phase changes

This is a life changing book.

January 2012; 235 pages