Complexity & Chaos By Roger White Narrated By Edwin Newman Roger White's discourse exists so far on the fringe of common knowledge that perhaps only a dozen people might understand it--and 11 of them could be lying. It talks of a conceptual revolution having its roots in four separate domains: fractals, chaos, self-organization, and emergent computation. Edwin Newman's calm narration handles the complex jargon with ease, and he sounds like he understands difficult concepts like the laws of thermodynamics.
Newtonian physics described a regular, clock-like world of forces and reaction; randomness was equated with incomplete knowledge. But scientists in the late twentieth century have found patterns in things formerly thought to be “chaotic”; their theories help explain the unstable, irregular, yet highly structured features of everyday experience. It now seems likely that randomness and chaos play an essential role in the evolution of the living world—and in intelligence itself.
The Science and Discovery series recreates one of history's most successful journeys—four thousand years of scientific efforts to better understand and control the physical world. Science has often challenged and upset conventional wisdom or accepted practices; this is a story of vested interests and independent thinkers, experiments and theories, change and progress. Aristotle, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and many others are featured.
The Next Fifty Years, Science in the First Half of the Twenty-first Century
Эту книгу можно было бы назвать футурологической, если бы она не была написана глубокими профессионалами своего дела.
Scientists love to speculate about the direction research and technology will take us, and editor John Brockman has given a stellar panel free rein to imagine the future in The Next Fifty Years. From brain-swapping and the hunt for extraterrestrials to the genetic elimination of unhappiness and a new scientific morality, the ideas in this book are wild and thought-provoking. The list of scientists and thinkers who participate is impressive: Lee Smolin and Martin Rees on cosmology; Ian Stewart on mathematics; and Richard Dawkins and Paul Davies on the life sciences, just to name a few. Many of the authors remind readers that science has changed a lot since the blind optimism of the early 20th century, and they are unanimously aware of the potential consequences of the developments they describe. Fifty years is a long time in the information age, and these essays do a credible and entertaining job of guessing where we're going.
Complexity & Chaos
The Next Fifty Years, Science in the First Half of the Twenty-first Century 
