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Product details

File Size: 21095 KB

Print Length: 271 pages

Page Numbers Source ISBN: 060960810X

Publisher: Broadway Books; 1 Amer ed edition (April 23, 2002)

Publication Date: April 23, 2002

Language: English

ASIN: B000RH0DZS

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A particularly interesting book which should be of interest to historians among others. The author, a physicist, demonstrates that events in a natural or historical environment move randomly into a critical state from which natural or historical catastrophes may or may not result. He applies mathematics to explain the randomness of the historical and natural world and shows how these same patterns apply to historical results in varied environments, but cannot be used to accurately predict the future.

In this book, titled ‘Ubiquity’, Mr. M. Buchanan, comes up with a new and fascinating discovery : There is a natural tendency toward instability “woven in the fabric of our world” which explains why catastrophes, both natural and human, happen. This tendency is ubiquitous and calls for a new science to better define it and demystify it. But, its footprints are everywhere in the spread of forest fires, earthquakes, stock market crashes, floods, and even in history and the rise and fall of nations.In this new 'science of ubiquity', as he calls it, the author believes that the whole world is modeled on a simple template. The basic concept is built around a pile of sand. Imagine trying to build up a pile of sand by dropping one particle at a time in the middle of the pile. Gradually, the pile will grow larger and higher into a conical shape with steep slopes. Ultimately, one reaches a stage, called the critical state, where adding on one more particle of sand creates an avalanche . That’s when the whole building process collapses. This, in the author’s theory, is how crises and catastrophes start. Of course, what happens at the critical stage, e.g. human interventions, will, where possible, define the course of subsequent events. For decades, if not centuries, scientists watched with horror the destruction in lives and properties caused by catastrophic eruptions whether in floods, earthquakes, fires, or even the stock markets. They watched in despair not knowing what to do. Some blamed these shocking events on God’s anger, or ignorance or mismanagement. But no one really had a clue. That is why this new discovery by Mr. Buchanan has been welcomed. At least, it shed some light on the nature of the problem .But there is much more to be done. In addition to verifying the the scope of this new science and its effectiveness we need to focus on the art of scientific predictions and preventions. Given that the above new science may be sound and acceptable, how do we employ it to prevent harm and destruction due to these natural catastrophes ?This reviewer lived through a major flooding disaster in the 1970’s in western NY state when a dyke broke and flooded the town. Although personally unharmed, the effect of the catastrophe left lasting, painful memories to this day. It became clear that the harm entailed by such events is not only physical (which could often be alleviated) but in fact psychological and mental. Watching friends and colleagues suffer physical and mental agonies was difficult to bear. Yet even after all these years, the cry for preventive measures is loud and clear - but mostly in vain.Fuad R QubeinDec. 2017

Great ideas, written with authority and showed the world is not predictable. But the book had no pertinent conclusion and got tantalizingly close to to some predictions at least . A power law, is it not one way of fitting data anyway, or perhaps that is the point of this difficult subject.My take home was that instabilities are out there in most natural systems and should be recognized as usual, though these can be managed if understood. Prediction of such systems relies on too many boundary conditions and should never be wrapped up in certainties.

Are there general rules in situations where scientists have so far failed to find predictable patterns (for instance, the timing of the next big earthquake, the form a snowflake might take, the next big move in the stock market, etc.)?The author explores examples of natural or social systems that are out of balance (in a “critical state”) – as these systems are stressed, they are in a constant battle between stability and instability. For instance, dropping grains of sand on a sand pile creates a critical state. Over time, with every new piece of sand dropping on a sand pile, whatever happens next becomes unpredictable.In a critical state, the individual system parts may act in accordance to “simple” and predictable rules, but because there are so many parts and they may each interact and influence each other, the emerging behavior of the system as a whole becomes complex and unpredictable.When you look back in time, however, the system's behavior is not random and a pattern emerges: the power law - every time a certain defining feature (earthquake strength, % change in stock market) is double (or halved), the number of times such a feature occurred in history increases or decreases by a fixed factor.The power law produces scale invariant or self-similar systems: systems that look fundamentally the same at a bigger or smaller scale (think of fractals in computer land).Because the system looks the same at every level, there is no fundamental difference between a very large event or a very small event (a massive or small earthquake, a huge or small stock market move, a large or small slide in a sand dune).The key implications are that there is no such thing as a typical fluctuation (patterns of change are neither regular nor random), there is no reason to think that a very large swing is unusual or needs further explaining, and it is fundamentally impossible to predict the magnitude of the upcoming change.Because of this, any attempt to look for a singular cause to explain complex behavior is doomed to fail – there are no simple, deterministic laws for complex chains of events.The only thing that can be said about critical states is that under certain conditions, systems of interacting objects show universal features in their behavior (the power law). These ubiquitous properties arise again and again in things driven away from equilibrium and in things in which history matters.There are many critical states in nature (forest fires, earthquakes, snowflakes, gas phase transitions) and it is somewhat awesome to think that while unpredictable, there is a universal pattern that governs their behavior.The book becomes more speculative in the exploration of critical states in social settings, such as the stock market, spread of diseases, and more broad societal patterns (wars, city size and structure, evolution of scientific paradigms).I’m still trying to figure out the takeaways. At some level, if you can only understand these systems in hindsight through statistic analysis and if you can’t predict what happens next and specific individual causes don’t really matter, then so what? Still chewing on that.An interesting part of the book is that the science behind critical states takes the form of designing and running simulation games. Simulating natural or social critical states in (computer) games with (surprisingly) basic parameters produces statistical results that very closely match what is observed in real life. It will be interesting to see how these games will develop further.I would have perhaps liked the book to have a bit more structure, such as in terms of specific definitions of critical states and their components. Also, there are very clear links with topics such as entropy, network / information theory, biology / brain / intelligence, and emergent behavior and exploring those links in more detail would have been interesting as well.Having said all this, love reading about this stuff: exploring and trying to understand complex systems.

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