Product Description

We are surrounded by order that physics can't explain. The spread of veins in the back of your hand mirror the spread of branches on a tree; fern leaves look a lot like maps of fjords; and the pulse patterns of your heartbeat bear a resemblance to some classical music.

But now the theory of Universality is using fractal patterns to explain much of the world around us. Universality argues that there are similar patterns behind the most unpredictable events such as earthquakes, avalanches, stock market crashes - even the way businesses are run and the way fashions come and go.

And while identifying patterns does not mean that we can always predict what will happen next, some of the trends scientists are noticing could deepen our understanding of natural phenomena and our relationship to them.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1159670 in Books
• Published on: 2002-07-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

About the Author
Mark Ward is a journalist who has written about science and technology for the New Scientist, the Daily Telegraph and the trade magazine Computer Weekly. He is now a technology reporter for the BBC. Mark Ward is the author of Virtual Organisms: The Startling World of Artificial Life (Pan).

Customer Reviews

Universal patterns
Science has opened the windows to the cold light of agnosticism by pushing back religion and diminishing the power of dogma. Universality in turn, shows that we are intimately connected to he universe in a most liberating sense. Universality emphasizes the interconnections between the elements of a system, whether these are the neurons in the brain or the droplets of water in a cloud. It also demonstrates that there is always a cause and that correlations can persist over very long spatial or temporal distances. The rise of universality is a result of the intellectual revolution started by chaos mathematics. In other words, universality is about the invisible force in the universe that is ubiquitous but still nameless, a force of order that is extremely powerful yet gentle. Ward examines the theories of universality, how they fit into a quest to discover the workings of the universe. He explores their possible limitations and considers what we can do with this new knowledge. He looks at the work of scientists Leo Kadanoff, Kenneth Wilson, Benoit Mandelbrot, Gene Stanley and Per Bak. The most interesting sections to me are those on the role of fractal patterns in our concept of beauty, fractals in the music of Bach and Beethoven and in Phil Thompson's work "Organised Chaos" of 1998 (which is based on the Mandelbrot set) and the determinable rhythms in finance and economics. Although modern physics is revealing more and more about particles (the very small) and the universe (the very large), it has not been focused on revealing much about the mundane and our everyday lives. Universality does this, in demonstrating how our bodies, our behaviour and nature are intimately connected. All of these different systems share a common principle, a single dynamic and a universal affinity. The author does not go into detailed discussions and theorising, for which I am grateful, as the text remains accessible enough for the general reader. What the book does reveal provides enough food for thought at this stage. The book includes portraits of the above-mentioned scientists, pictures of fractal patterns in leaves and lungs and migrating antelope, plus the fractal patterns in a work by Jackson Pollock. I recommend this book to all who are interested in cosmology, chaos theory and the golden mean (sacred geometry).