Customer Reviews

Bigger than Chaos: Understanding Complexity through Probability

5 star:		(0)
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3 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

While the subject of the book is undoubtedly brilliant the author lacks the ability to effectively communicate his ideas through the written word. While the subject is intriguing the book is not. While each sentence is properly composed and accurate, the stringing together of words is both inelegant and confusing leaving the reader befuddled and back tracking to decide if there was anything meaningful to be extracted. Each page could seemingly be effectively sewn up in a paragraph and each chapter in a page. If your mind enjoys science and the topic of probablistic science intrigues you, make sure to first read a full page and ask yourself if you really want to read the next. I found that I did not. Perhaps a strong editor could help the author more elegantly convey his message.

Complementing the argument from symmetry, there is a more detailed physics argument for why a tossed coin has chance 1/2 of landing heads. In brief, landing heads corresponds to the initial conditions at the instant of tossing being in a certain subset of "phase space", and the microscopic uncertainty in initial conditions (you can't toss a coin twice in exactly the same way) gets amplified; locally in phase space, half the possibilities lead to heads. This type of argument -- macroscopic randomness arises from local smoothness of probability distributions at a microscopic level -- has analogs in other contexts; a student is roughly as likely to score 73 as 74 on a final exam. At some vague level, these ideas are known (and regarded as "obvious") to mathematicians and physicists interested in conceptual aspects of probability. Indeed I give one lecture on the topic in an undergraduate course. But it has never been discussed in a clear, careful and detailed way, so I would give the author 5 stars for attempting to do so.

Alas the exposition strikes me as a complete disaster. Based on a few simple examples, the author builds some axiomatization and invents terminology ("microconstant experiment with one IC variable" is just the start) accompanied with lengthy verbal discussion. But what's going on in the concrete examples is easy to understand. An abstract development would be welcome if it led to increased understanding of more complicated concrete examples, but to me it merely obfuscates.