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Chaos
- Making a New Science
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
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Publisher's summary
James Gleick explains the theories behind the fascinating new science called chaos. Alongside relativity and quantum mechanics, it is being hailed as the 20th century's third revolution.
Critic reviews
“Fascinating . . . almost every paragraph contains a jolt.” (The New York Times)
“Highly entertaining . . . a startling look at newly discovered universal laws.” (Chicago Tribune)
“An awe-inspiring book. Reading it gave me that sensation that someone had just found the light switch.” (Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
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Throughout history, scientists have come up with theories and ideas that just don't seem to make sense. These we call paradoxes. The paradoxes Al-Khalili offers are drawn chiefly from physics and astronomy and represent those that have stumped some of the finest minds. With elegant explanations that bring the listener inside the mind of those who've developed them, Al-Khalili helps us to see that, in fact, paradoxes can be solved if seen from the right angle.
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Almost Useless
- By Michael on 06-19-19
By: Jim Al-Khalili
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Forces of Nature
- By: Professor Brian Cox, Andrew Cohen
- Narrated by: Samuel West
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Professor Brian Cox uncovers some of the most extraordinary natural events on Earth and in the universe and beyond. From the immensity of the universe and the roundness of Earth to the form of every single snowflake, the forces of nature shape everything we see. Pushed to extremes, the results are astonishing. In seeking to understand the everyday world, the colours, structure, behaviour and history of our home, we develop the knowledge and techniques necessary to step beyond the everyday.
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Complicated in its simplicity
- By Philomath on 06-13-17
By: Professor Brian Cox, and others
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Life’s Ratchet
- How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos
- By: Peter M. Hoffman
- Narrated by: Paul Hodgson
- Length: 9 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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The cells in our bodies consist of molecules, made up of the same carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen atoms found in air and rocks. But molecules, such as water and sugar, are not alive. So how do our cells - assemblies of otherwise "dead" molecules - come to life, and together constitute a living being? In Life’s Ratchet, physicist Peter M. Hoffmann locates the answer to this age-old question at the nanoscale.
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For biologists to learn single molecule biophysics
- By A Synthetic Biologist on 09-04-14
By: Peter M. Hoffman
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The Unknown Universe
- A New Exploration of Time, Space and Cosmology
- By: Stuart Clark
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 8 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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On March 21, 2013, the European Space Agency released a map of the afterglow of the big bang. Taking in 440 sextillion kilometers of space and 13.8 billion years of time, it is physically impossible to make a better map: We will never see the early universe in more detail. On the one hand, such a view is the apotheosis of modern cosmology; on the other, it threatens to undermine almost everything we hold cosmologically sacrosanct.
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Everything, Absolutely Everything!
- By Gillian on 03-09-17
By: Stuart Clark
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The Big Picture
- On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself
- By: Sean Carroll
- Narrated by: Sean Carroll
- Length: 17 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Already internationally acclaimed for his elegant, lucid writing on the most challenging notions in modern physics, Sean Carroll is emerging as one of the greatest humanist thinkers of his generation as he brings his extraordinary intellect to bear not only on the Higgs boson and extra dimensions but now also on our deepest personal questions. Where are we? Who are we? Are our emotions, our beliefs, and our hopes and dreams ultimately meaningless out there in the void?
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ABSOLUTE MUST READ!
- By serine on 05-12-16
By: Sean Carroll
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A Beginner’s Guide to Reality
- Exploring Our Everyday Adventures in Wonderland
- By: Jim Baggott
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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A unique fusion of philosophy and metaphysics set against the backdrop of contemporary culture. Have you ever wondered if the world is really there when you're not looking? We tend to take the reality of our world very much for granted. This book will lead you down the rabbit hole in search of something we can point to, hang our hats on, and say this is real.
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A real great listen on the nature of reality
- By Patrick Mabry, Jr. on 07-30-14
By: Jim Baggott
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The Upright Thinkers
- The Human Journey From Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos
- By: Leonard Mlodinow
- Narrated by: Leonard Mlodinow
- Length: 12 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In this fascinating and illuminating work, Leonard Mlodinow guides us through the critical eras and events in the development of science, all of which, he demonstrates, were propelled forward by humankind's collective struggle to know. From the birth of reasoning and culture to the formation of the studies of physics, chemistry, biology, and modern-day quantum physics, we come to see that much of our progress can be attributed to simple questions - why? how? - bravely asked.
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10/10 Got What I Wanted.
- By Austin on 09-22-15
By: Leonard Mlodinow
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Knocking on Heaven's Door
- How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World
- By: Lisa Randall
- Narrated by: Carrington MacDuffie
- Length: 14 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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The latest developments in physics have the potential to radically revise our understanding of the world: its makeup, its evolution, and the fundamental forces that drive its operation. Knocking on Heaven's Door is an exhilarating and accessible overview of these developments and an impassioned argument for the significance of science. There could be no better guide than Lisa Randall.
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Too Political
- By Allan on 12-14-11
By: Lisa Randall
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Coming of Age in the Milky Way
- By: Timothy Ferris
- Narrated by: Timothy Ferris
- Length: 2 hrs and 44 mins
- Abridged
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Humans have long sought to comprehend the enormities of cosmic space and time. Here, best selling science writer Timothy Ferris tells the story of that quest. He interweaves the majestic themes of astronomy, physics, religion, and philosophy with fresh and lasting portraits of the men and women who created what has been called our society's most precious treasure - its conception of the universe at large.
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Brief survey of discovery from Columbus to now
- By serine on 01-23-16
By: Timothy Ferris
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The World According to Physics
- By: Jim Al-Khalili
- Narrated by: Jim Al-Khalili
- Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Shining a light on the most profound insights revealed by modern physics, Jim Al-Khalili invites us all to understand what this crucially important science tells us about the universe and the nature of reality itself. Al-Khalili begins by introducing the fundamental concepts of space, time, energy, and matter, and then describes the three pillars of modern physics - quantum theory, relativity, and thermodynamics - showing how all three must come together if we are ever to have a full understanding of reality.
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excellent book
- By Anonymous User on 05-10-21
By: Jim Al-Khalili
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very enjoyable and informative
- By Christopher Smith, Esq. on 08-28-23
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very enjoyable and informative
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Recent years have seen the introduction of concepts from the new and exciting field of complexity science that have captivated the attention of economists, sociologists, engineers, businesspeople, and many others. These include tipping points, the wisdom of crowds, six degrees of separation (or Kevin Bacon), and emergence. Complexity science can shed light on why businesses or economies succeed and fail, how epidemics spread and can be stopped, and what causes ecological systems to rebalance themselves after a disaster.
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Past it's prime
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Richard Feynman's Science
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With In a Flight of Starlings, celebrated physicist Giorgio Parisi guides us through his unorthodox yet exhilarating work, starting with investigating the principles of physics by observing the flight of flocks of birds. Studying the movements of these communities, he has realized, proves an illuminating way into understanding complex systems of all kinds—collections of everything from atoms and planets to other animals, such as ourselves. Along the way, he reflects on the lessons he has taken from a life in pursuit of scientific truth.
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Have you ever seen an inch or touched an hour? In The Holographic Web, Alan Watts reveals how our idea of the "self" is no more than these abstract concepts - and how to untrain ourselves from thier limitations. Join this self-proclaimed "spiritual entertainer" for an intriguing investigation of the nature of consciousness.
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Alan Watts is a treat!
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The Science of Information: From Language to Black Holes
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The Science of Information: From Language to Black Holes covers the exciting concepts, history, and applications of information theory in 24 challenging and eye-opening half-hour lectures taught by Professor Benjamin Schumacher of Kenyon College. A prominent physicist and award-winning educator at one of the nation’s top liberal arts colleges, Professor Schumacher is also a pioneer in the field of quantum information, which is the latest exciting development in this dynamic scientific field.
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Not appropriate for audio-only
- By Katz-Mulvey Family on 03-12-19
By: Benjamin Schumacher, and others
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Chaos Theory
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Since Shelbi enrolled at Windward Academy as a senior and won’t be there very long, she hasn’t bothered making friends. What her classmates don’t know about her can’t be used to hurt her—you know, like it did at her last school. Andy Criddle’s had far too much to drink. Again. Which is bad. And things are about to get worse. When Shelbi sees Andy at his lowest, she can relate. So she doesn’t resist reaching out. And there’s no doubt their connection has them both seeing stars . . . but the closer they get, the more the past threatens to pull their universes apart.
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Brought to Life
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What listeners say about Chaos
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Ryanman
- 03-02-11
Best AudioBook on Math/Physics yet
Wow. What a great book. I had no idea that this was a book about both math and physics. I'm a math major and a calculus two student and this book has helped me to get inside the thinking of a Mathematician. It helps to show what types of problems they work on and how they think as they attack the problems. It introduces one to the culture of Math and the real world applications of physics.
As with any audio math book, there are some parts where you might have trouble visualizing the shapes being described. I dealt with this by looking them on online later. but that was only about three times during the nine hour book. Overall, there were not too many parts where I could not keep up with the math. Maybe one or two times; however, it wasn't really needed to keep up with the flow of the story. The book is more like a story. I enjoyed the real world examples and the journey through much of the research that led up to choas theory. The book doesn't just introduce the people who's research led to choas theory; it takes one through the basics of thier experiements and results. You share in the triumphs and problems. Overall a great book for people who like physics, math, theory, and thought.
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59 people found this helpful
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- Ryan
- 12-03-12
Still a consciousness-expanding introduction
Chaos, the concept, is often explained in terms of a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world, which sets off a long chain of consequences leading to rain falling in another part of the world. It's an overworn cliche by now, but one that still gets to the heart of a quality of nature that scientists and mathematicians prior to the 20th century didn't really grasp. It was hardly their fault. Living in the age of slide rules and tables (or before), they can't really be blamed for focusing on phenomena that were predictable, linear, and led to stable outcomes, and ignoring those that seemed too noisy, erratic, and error-prone to be represented with an equation.
Yet, as the age of computers dawned, it became clear that the "noise" in many natural systems wasn't error at all, but held its own elusive underlying order. The feedback loops in these systems would magnify initial discrepancies over time, but they would also perform a sort of self-correction, giving rise to repeated patterns and patterns-within-patterns -- similar, like the shape of clouds, but never exactly the same. It's now apparent that this complex dance between coherence and instability, between the macroscopic and the microscopic, drives many of nature's most interesting phenomena, from the branching of blood vessels into smaller ones, to how particles of smoke curl around each other, to the way a snowflake's shape reflects its journey through the atmosphere. Human consciousness itself seems to be an example of a chaotic, endlessly self-referential system.
Chaos, the book, though written in 1987, still does an excellent job of connecting the discoveries that opened the door to Chaos Theory. Gleick introduces us to figures like Edward Lorenz, whose work in weather prediction revealed that tiny differences in input in even simple mathematical models could lead to vast differences in output over time; Robert May, who discovered chaotic patterns in population dynamics; and Benoit Mandelbrot, now considered the father of fractals. Along the way, he touches on fundamental concepts like strange attractors, fractal dimension, bifurcation, complex boundaries, and the Mandlebrot set (whose astonishing visual representation you've seen if you’ve set foot in a poster shop in the last 25 years).
This is one of those books I'd recommend to people who already have some familiarity with the topic. While its purpose is introductory and there's little math, per se, I think the underlying profundities will be more obvious to readers who have taken a college-level math course or two or three. That disclaimer aside, I found Gleick's writing articulate, and seldom had much trouble visualizing what he was talking about, even listening to the audiobook. It's worth having the print edition on hand for the pictures and diagrams, but if you don't, the internet should suffice.
Despite being 25 years old, Chaos remains an invigorating read, offering a sense of discoveries and inventions yet to be made, and demonstrating that separate fields like physics, chemistry, biology, information theory, computing, cognitive science, climatology, and economics aren't as separate as we might think. As bonus, a 2000s-era afterward in the audiobook provides a brief update of progress in some areas since the book's original publication, and some thoughts on its cultural impact.
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- Darwin8u
- 08-18-15
The future is disorder
“The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
Half of what draws me to physics, to theory, to Feynman and Fermat, to Wittgenstein and Weber, is the energy that boils beyond the theory. The force living just beyond the push. I'm not alone. Many of my favorite authors (Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) and musicians (Mahler, Beethoven, etc) all dance around this same wicked fire. This burn of the natural world, this magic of the unknown, is what draws me to read physics and philosophy as an absolute amature. There are pieces and fractures in these books that actually DON'T escape me. They hit my brain and spin and keep spinning forever. I imagine this is something felt also by Gleick, one of the top tier science writers out there.
My big grievance with this book is it falls too short. His narrative is compelling, yes, the stories are interesting, sure, but he doesn't grab the central characters as well as a new journalist like John McPhee does. He floats too far above the actual science and complexity. He shows you pictures and dances around the pools of chaos and clouds of complexity, but never actually puts the reader INTO the churning water or energized, cumuliform heaps.
This is a book for an advanced HS senior or an average college Freshman. It is pop-science and definitely has its place. This is a book that is more about translating the story of the science (not the science) for NOT the layman, but really the lazy layman. That is probably one of the reasons it did so well. Anyway, I'm glad I read it, but just wish it was deeper, thicker, and way less predictable.
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- jeff
- 11-08-11
FRACTALS, SETS, & 4.6692
Exceptionally informative. Well written and narrated. My only complaint is I, like many others, am a kinesthetic learner. So I could manipulate the sets or draw fractals whilst listening, but I'd rather have a visual of the material. Too esoteric for audio alone. Worth buying, but you'll find yourself on wikipedia, YouTube, or a .edu site connecting the topics to a visual. The butterfly effect is best seen as 3D, for example.
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- Jeff
- 04-05-12
VERY IMPORTANT WORK
Chaos is seen as one of the 3 known pillars in our understanding of the universe, along with quantum physics and Einsteins relativity work. That being the case it behooves you to check out this amazing work. The fact that Gleick isnt just able to clearly convey the structure of such an un-intuitive idea like chaos but makes it a highly readable book shows stunning skill. I was so impressed with his writing in this book that I sought out all his other books. He is a remarkable science writer!
Obviously a book of this density requires your full attention, but so what, the fact is we would glean far more from whatever we read if we always gave it our full attention. I think that your attention is the only prerequisite for reading this. I found it to be an amazing eye opening ride and truly one of those enlightening books were always searching for.Me anyway.
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- Brady
- 05-11-11
This was painful to listen to
This was painful to listen to. I'm an engineer by profession and I love all of the stuff about the "butterfly effect", fractals, etc. But after giving this my best shot and grinding through listening to it for about 6 hours - I finally stopped. I could not bear to go on. It simply was not written in a way to hold my interest. Too many mundane facts. Too dry. Too technical. This was a great opportunity for the author to bring something really cool to the masses and get people interested. Instead, it was written more like a college math text book with dropping a lot of names over and over.
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- Bill
- 05-19-11
Must read to catch up with how things work
When I first started looking at Chaos, my boss dismissed it as bad science and trick math. James Gleick walks you through the proof that my boss was wrong. The further you go in this book, the more you will see how "Choas" is all around us. Thought provoking and drives you to want to know more
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- ES
- 01-21-16
lapses into gibberish
Any additional comments?
The book starts OK with interesting pieces of information. It never really defines its subject of chaos. Most natural and artificial processes and systems that have seemingly random variations may have an underlying structure that is best modeled as non-linear. That is not a big revelation but the author treats it as one. Eventually all kinds of processes are invoked and terms are tossed around with no attempt at clear understanding.
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- peter
- 07-12-11
more poetry than science
Not so interesting for those interested in hard science, but poetically brought. I thought the book sync by Strogatz was more interesting.
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- Joy
- 12-14-12
Great overview of chaos
Would you consider the audio edition of Chaos to be better than the print version?
It's convenient to listen to, and the narrator is great. However, there are occasionally figures in the book that I had to look up to visualize (e.g. period doubling). If I had the printed version, I would not have been able to finish it as quickly as reading on the subway gives me a headache. So, while the audio is not necessarily better than the print version, it's definitely complementary.
Any additional comments?
Don't need a rigorous math background to understand the concepts. The historical context from Chaos made my nonlinear dynamics textbooks much more interesting! Chaos covers fascinating examples from economics to biology. The book makes it easy to look up references and original research papers. The narrator was great as well. Highly recommended for both casual readers and those who would want to delve deeper into the concepts afterwards.
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