I finally resumed and finished reading Steven Strogatz‘s book “SYNC: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order“.
Dr. Strogatz is a professor at Cornell University, and has had a prolific career examining complex systems in diverse fields such as circadian rhythms, Josephson Junctions, and “small-world networks“. This book captures many of the stories of progress in these and related fields of today’s progressive minds.
The book covers a very diverse set of discoveries and domains, with many notable scientists along the way. It’s too much to recount here, without creating a 10 page review. However, the most notable subjects to me are:
- the basic conditions of connectedness and similarity of components of a synchonized system.
- circadian rhythms, and how nice it is to know I’m normal, not lazy.
- Kirkwood Gaps, which are gaps in the Asteroid Belt which coincide with orbital ratios with Jupiter.
- the spooky magic of quantum mechanics in Josephson Junctions.
- coupled chaotic systems synchronizing.
- spiral and scroll waves in excitable media
- small-world networks, where the cliquiness/clumping is still high, yet the average path between two nodes is very small. Scale-free networks are a sub-category of these types of networks.
- the spontaneous nature of brain cell synchronization in memory and cognition
Unfortunately, I didn’t read this book in a dense set of settings, and there’s many names a disciplines to go around, so I’m forgetting many notable details.
Still, it’s a very good survey book regaring dynamical / non-linear / complex / systems science that has taken place in the past few years. 3 of 4 possible stars.