Customer Reviews

Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness

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Very well thought out survey of chaos theory presents a metaphorical mirror as a means to magnify and project into view the hidden world of turbulence. The advent of the computer has brought chaos and fractals out of the closet. Here the authors teach the reader how to navigate in the turbulent world from the submicroscopic realms to the distant galaxies. The authors dish up a huge concept list: fractal dimensions, strange attractors, holograms, soliton bubbles, bifurcation, quantum phase locking, coevolution of species and the earth as Gaia -- all in an attempt to teach the reader the folly of allowing the part/whole dichotomy to rule your perception of the universe.

The book is a stark attack on those the authors term reductionists -- those who seek answers in breaking the whole into ever smaller parts. The authors' pet writers are David Bohm, Lynn Margulis, and Llya Prigogine but they toss in another hundred ideas for irregular stepping stones to get where they are going. Where is that? They composed an evangelical message -- that man now has the tools and knowledge to step through Alice's Looking Glass into an entirely new and mystical perception of the whole. They see chaos as a source of future evolution and life.

I give the authors a high mark for original thought. Although using a hundred other science writers to frame their ideas, they direct the reader to go beyond existing theories and strike a path for the center of the turbulent mirror. The diagrams and illustrations also were very helpful. They pictured the brain as a strange attractor, with thought arbitrating between the two realms of order and chaos. My favorite metaphor was the slime mold which, when food gets scarce, merges from being a collection of individual cells to a collective entity moving across the forest floor. This was to show an example of quantum phase locking which "could provide a bridge joining classical, nonlinear reality with linear, quantum reality" (P. 188). Great Two Thousand year Philosophy.

This book provides a great introduction to chaos theory and strikes a devastating blow to reductionism. Using a historical approach, the book walks the reader through the discoveries and mathematics that underlie fractals, chaos and complexity. It also provides a short, fascinating interview with Ilya Prigogine and a great layperson's introduction to his ideas. Turbulent Mirror makes the point that because of "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" one can not really separate the whole from the parts - in essence there really are no "initial conditions." The only weakness of this book, IMHO, is the use of occasional Alice and Wonderland illustrations and a few too many quotes from eastern philosophy. These are not overpowering, however, so if you don't like them them can ignore them and enjoy the rest of the material which is truly great.

A wonderful synthesis of science at the edge. A grasp of how scientific methodology is changing to accommodate the revelations of chaos theory. The used edition I read was from 1990 and is prescient even now (alas). The informed and illuminating evidence that revolutionizes the current Neo-Darwinistic paradigm of molecular evolutionary theory towards the end of the book was particularly refreshing. John Briggs and F. Peat's thinking is so strikingly lucid, informed, and visionary that this book will fail to make almost any lecture list where it is most needed for years to come.

What I read is a Chinese translation of the book. Although I do not fully understand the researches and examples involved in explaining the development from 'Order to Chaos' (the first few chapters), and I have not yet experienced some of the interesting events that described, I am amazed by the final few chapters about the possible role of chaos theory in the development of cells, organisms, RNA, DNA, and about creativity and 'nuance.' What I find most debatable is the responsibility of reductionism in creating the problems for nature and humanity, or detouring the course of science. I certainly believe that the scientists and thinkers before us forged the foundation for us, and from their experience, we discover the verity of past knowledge. I don't think Darwin would appreciate we calling him a reductionist because at that time, reductionism was the way of science, not to mention that 'reductionism' is a modern classification. The book also details a lot of examples to explain that most phenomenons are the results of nonlinear chaos complexity. I can't help but notice the strong implication of creationism, with chaos theory as the creator instead of God.

The new science of Chaos has revolutionized not only science, but how all disciplines think. Chaos is the closest science has come to becoming a religion.
This is more of a text book, than a fun read, but it takes a very complicated subject and helps break it down into something digestible for the layman. Don't think you will know all about Chaos and it might take some rereading in some chapters, but overall good reading. The illustrations are marvelous as well.

Here is an easy to read exposition of the theory of order out of chaos and how the natural world arises from basic natural processes repeated over and over again. The relevance of fractals to this study is given as well as a description of psychic processes. A must read for anyone interested in the new science. All the more complex theories of interest to the magical endeavor are based on the ideas presented in this book. It's an excellent companion to James Gleick's "Chaos."

This is my favorite book on the subject for the layperson. The authors have done an excellent job of exploring chaos theory from all angles. Nor do they ignore the philosophical ramifications. Very little math or science knowledge is necessary to read this book, but whatever your background, be prepared to have your mind stretched.

Chaos theory is opening new frontiers in everything from cosmology to neurology. This world of apparent order is built on the turbulence of chaos. Without chaos, we would not exist.

The only way to improve this book would be to take a step up into multimedia. The section on the Mandelbrot set, handled as well as possible in the book format, cries out for video. I would suggest that once you read this section, you should search on youtube for some of the video explorations of this infinitely complex geometry.

As the authors intimate toward the end of the book, the full understanding of chaos theory will take us beyond our limited concept of selfhood and into a new relationship with the world we inhabit.

It's a strange new universe, and Alice didn't see the half of it.

This book opened my eyes to the wonder of fractals and chaos. I cannot recommend this book highly enough!

I've finished this book's Chinese version today. In the last year, I'm trying my best effort to absorb knowledge of Chaos Theory, Complexity, and Catastrophe Theory. It's quite hard to get a in-depth guild of the above knowledge to common people in Hong Kong.

My purpose to get the above knowledge is just in order to find the hidden order of financial market, and, of course, to make profit from the market. That's why I find this book is good to serve my purpose. It explained clearly on fractals, the relationship between chaos and order, and non-linearness.

I knew E. Peters has using fratals / Elloit Wave Theory to analyze financial market. Of course, it needs more intra-day data to try to find such fratals in a small scale period, e.g. in a 5-minute charts. But I guess that, such fractal are existing in the market, if you watching index movement everyday.

On another aspest, the technique of plotting data in a phase space is a tool to get the picture of financial market to me. This tools can be compared with weighted moving average, MACD, or other technical indicators. Though, phase space analysis is quite uneasy to a man without advanced mathematics. I'm quite sure such mathematical technique may apply to financial trading.

Besides, the idea of "quasi-periodic" is likely describing financial market. Though I got less knowledge from the book on this topic. It sounds like some ideas from William Gann, and other cyclist writings.

Hince, I'm benefitted from the book to enlighten new view point to see the world, and the market. I recommend any financial market practitioner to read this Chaos Theory guild and then reread some technical analysis classics, and reviewing their trading strategies. I believe that shall be worthy in one's trading life.

N.B. The picture 2.7 is missing (P.76), and there is some printing errors in its Chinese version which printed in 20.6.1997

While this book does make some interesting points about chaos, I found that the book's blatant disregard for accepted science very hard to stomach. I currently attend Harvey Mudd College, a small, but highly regarded science and engineering school, so I like to think that I know something about the subject.

For example, at one point the authors are describing solitons (a term I had never heard before), states a theory that by generating an extra bit of energy we could put the universe out of the unstable equilibrium it currently exists in and cause it to "begin to boil." While this is all well and good, it makes vast assumptions that the authors neglect to mention. Most importantly it assumes that the universe is in an unstable equilibrium, a fact which although highly unlikely is not impossible. Secondly it assumes that the universe is completely clean of these bits of extra energy currently. They draw this parallel to an example of superheating water because without external particles to build upon no bubbles can form to release the steam. This is also true, but it is still impossible because it is impossible to have a perfect system like this. There are always going to be minute cracks in the pot, or imperfections in the water (fractal theory, covered earlier in the book, even states this!), and so while this might be theoretically possible it will not happen in any real world environment. The book has many other places like this where the authors conveniently leave out details that might weaken their arguments. I find this to make the book as a whole very frustrating to read, even if some of their points are valid.

Another reason that I find the book to be very frustrating is that everything is very sensationalized. At the beginning of the description of fractals the authors say that the first person to think of a fractal curve created "a panic among mathematicians that took some fifty years to resolve." I find it truly hard to believe that the entire mathematical community was pulling their collective hair for fifty years trying to explain this curve, but by phrasing it this way the authors make it seem like science as a whole does not want to accept new ideas because it would make them look bad. In reality though I think the scientific community is ready to accept anything that can be strongly proven theoretically, or experimentally (just look at relativity, or quantum).

Because of all of these failings I would not recommend this book. I am sure that there are many other better books about chaos theory that do an excellent job of describing it without disregarding the rest of science, or trying to place it in places where it does not necessarily belong.