Product Description

Thuan recounts how a profound change in our worldview has come about, as the Newtonian picture of a sterile mechanistic and deterministic world, which dominated Western thought for 300 years, has, in the 20th century, given way to a liberated world brimming with creativity. We now recognise that reality is moulded by contingent events. The book details, in clear prose, how this sweeping change in world view has come about, using examples drawn from Astronomy, Physics, Biology and Mathematics. The science is presented soberly and accurately, but the book is suffused with passion and effectively communicates the feelings and values which accompany scientific understanding.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3028757 in Books
• Published on: 2000-10
• Original language: French
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 366 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Trinh Xuan Thuan, whose books of popular science are bestsellers in France, is an astronomer by training. In Chaos and Harmony, he reaches well beyond the immediate bounds of that field to consider the explosion of scientific knowledge of all kinds in the 20th century, and he muses on the very nature of scientific inquiry.

The most important aspect of a theory of science, in Trinh's view, is not that it be verifiable experimentally but that it "allow beauty and truth to emerge into one." General relativity is a hallmark in this regard: it is unendingly rich in insight and implication; "inevitable, simple and congruent with the whole," it has enabled cosmologists to range across the whole of time and to conceive of such phenomena as black holes and curved space. Trinh applies his beauty-and-truth criterion to various problems, such as where the moon--the largest known satellite in the solar system--came from, how chaos theory can properly be applied to economic modelling, and why nature seems to favour symmetry. Along the way Trinh pauses to remark on episodes in the history of science and to make gentle but provocative asides (at one point, for example, gainsaying Einstein to insist that God does indeed play dice with the universe). Elegant and lively, Trinh's book makes for a fine survey of contemporary scientific ideas, and a look ahead at science's ongoing quest for a unifying Theory of Everything. --Gregory McNamee

Review
Here is a valuable, broad-brush sketch and popularization of the interface between the simple and the complex, be it in the physical, chemical, biological, engineering or behavioural domain ... well-written ... particularly useful is an extensive Glossary of technical terms ... All-in-all, this wonderful fact filled book is slightly more Chaos than Harmony! Zentralblatt MATH