Gleick's way of telling the stories makes the reader share in the wonder and incredulity of each pioneer as he stumbled upon this hitherto unguessed truth of nature.

The sense of "information" he ends with is simply the notion that at certain levels, such as the level of quarks, the objects of study are indistinguishable from the formalisms by which we know them. For me, the real impact is that it has changed the way I look at the ordinary everyday world - the leaves, the trees, the pebbles, the pattern on the peels of an orange - everything is strangely magnified and beautiful now. That is an interesting concept, but it actually has little to do with "information" as treated in the rest of the book: alphabets, calculators, cyphers, telegraphs, genes, Wikipedia articles.Despite his attentiveness to the father of information theory, Shannon, Gleick never got around to explicitly saying what makes something information, nor did Gleick implicitly follow any solid definition of information. Sve je to vrlo interesantno, umešno napisano i razborito objašnjeno, ali je i dalje tek za lestvicu iznad laičkog poznavanja teme. Having grown up with a computer, I found most points argued in this book painfully obvious common sense. For instance, Mitchell Feigenbaum, who constructed and regulated his life by a 26-hour clock and watched his waking hours come in and out of phase with those of his coworkers at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

I think anyone remotely curious in science and physics, and in particular topics like uncertainty, randomness, nonlinearities, etc. Somehow, this tiny difference was enough to throw the weather prediction completely off the previous track. Now that these kind of doing science was quit established, other disciplines began to join the league, looking for solutions to problems which they previously lacked the adequate tools.French physician Albert Libchaber teamed up with an engineer for an experiment meant to prove Feigenbaum’s theory of turbulent fluid motion. It seems to me like this book represents a time in history before people had gotten accustom to handling complexity and information theory in computers. The other day when the radio announcer reported the length of the Florida coastline, I found myself wondering what length measuring stick was used.

In an apparent coincidence, a small number of unrelated people became interested in studying aperiodic, non-linear problems arising in various fields of science all at roughly the same time.There is a section of "notes", which appears to be a collection of endnotes containing citations and comments, presumably for the many unsourced quotations in the book. The book could have benefited from a lecture style presentation, with clear chapter introductions and summaries, so that I could see how it all fit together, not to mention what year he was currently talking about. The dynamics seem so basic—shapes changing in space and time—yet only now are the tools available to understand them. Then, you may wind up contemplating how much of that migration was due to Jeff Goldblum's ham-fisted illustrations in "Jurassic Park". The content consists of a few badly written half-biographies, a few pretty pictures and vignettes of science, and no worthwhile mathematics whatsoever.

Instead of scrolling through your social media news feed, this is a much better way to spend your spare time in my opinion. Instead he focusses on giving a poetic account of the scientists who first stumbled on it -- and their great surprise and their struggles form the narrative crux of the book. I also didn't care for the tone of the brief profiles of the various physicists and mathematicians - it felt like name-dropping to me. From time to time, on rare occasions, I would form a binary event tree of life and would try to figure out the initial events that accumulated into current condition of life.

The book covers chaos theory under the lens of four themes: sensitive dependence on initial conditions, self-similarity, universality, and nonlinearity. It sounded unscientific, unconventional, and most importantly, it seemed to complicate – even contradict – what they thought they knew about the universe. It portrays the efforts of dozens of scientists whose separate work contributed to the developing field. even though it's only nominally related to the informational topics discussed in the rest of the book.