Chaos

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Balachandran, Balakumar; Hogan, John (June 1999). "Featured Review: So You Have Been Asked to Give a Lecture Course on the Applications of Nonlinear Dynamics..." SIAM Review. 41 (2): 375–382. ISSN 0036-1445. JSTOR 2653080.

Billions of years ago there were just blobs of protoplasm; now billions of years later here we are. So information has been created and stored in our structure. In the development of one person’s mind from childhood, information is clearly not just accumulated but also generated—created from connections that were not there before”Of course, they knew that it was hard to get perfect measurements on something as complicated as the weather. But they thought that with good enough data and a lot of computer power, it would be possible to calculate the weather for months ahead – at least roughly. I know this implication of butterfly effect in popular culture is often erroneous. Because it's almost always impossible to know what factors actually tipped off a particular system. But there are always chances that changes in initial condition might accumulate into something different. Or they may not - maybe things happen inevitably. However, we have no way to learn! Everyone with a curious mind will enjoy learning about the story of how we as a Western society built up to and then entered the Information Age. In all of science there lie deep and irresolute fissures that necessitate the existence of many mutually exclusive domains of knowledge. Each with its own lexicon, icons, dogmas, turfs to defend and legacies to uphold. Each operating relatively independently with little communication with or interest in what goes on outside their four walls.

We make our own storehouses. The persistence of information, the difficulty of forgetting, so characteristic of our time, accretes confusion." Devaney, Robert L. (November 1989). "Review of Chaos: Making a New Science". The College Mathematics Journal. 20 (5): 458–459. doi: 10.2307/2686940. ISSN 0746-8342. JSTOR 2686940. Discovering the universal principles of nonlinear systems, Mitchell Feigenbaum elevated chaos theory to new levels of credibility And the car accident scene from "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldoHL...Telephony reduced the barriers to telecommunication by reducing the middle man, saved money for businesses by reducing the need for messengers and increasing the speed of messages. Telephony also drove further information technology innovations. Phone companies (or THE phone company at the time) devoted considerable resources to dealing with problems of long distance transmission of voice information over inherently "lossy" copper wires. Sifting meaningful signal from distance-induced static and noise became of focus of some particularly talented engineers. Analysis of this problem lead to mathematical abstractions as they tried to reduce "information" to the lowest possible common denominator. How small of a signal can carry a message? How can "message" be defined mathematically? The idea of the "bit" became common and the field of information theory began to take off. It had existed before, but it had never flowered in the way that modern communications forced it to. Claude Shannon is a central figure in the development of modern information theory and his revolutionary ideas are quoted extensively throughout the book. Parallel developments in information theory occurred with Alan Turing who developed the theoretical basis for computing before any of the hardware existed. I found it quite informative, especially in communicating what it would perhaps be like working in science at an exciting time. However there were many sections that bored me and aperiodic jumps in his focus that left me lost a bit.