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While humans have had to deal with chaos since ancient times, only recently has science recognized it as a fundamental force in the universe. Chaos theory, originally used to understand the movements that create thunderstorms, raging rivers, and hurricanes, is now being applied to everything from medicine to warfare to social dynamics and theories about how organizations form and change. Chaos is evolving from a scientific theory into a cultural metaphor. As a metaphor it allows us to query some of our most cherished assumptions and encourages us to ask fresh questions about reality. Our modern society has been obsessed with conquering and scientifically controlling the world around us. However, chaotic, nonlinear systems - such as nature, society, and our individual lives - lie beyond all our attempts to predict, manipulate, and control them. Chaos suggests that instead of resisting life's uncertainties, we should embrace the possibilities they offer. In this groundbreaking new book, John Briggs and F. David Peat unfold seven lessons for embracing chaos in daily life:
If you have ever felt your life was out of control and headed towards chaos, science has an important message: Life is chaos, and that's a very exciting thing.  |
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Publishing InformationF. David Peat and John Briggs, authors New! Paperback, 224 pages
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Praise for Seven Life Lessons of Chaos"In their previous work, Turbulent Mirror, the authors gave us one of the best non-technical explanations of chaos and complexity theory. Now they have taken the next step, engaging us in wide-ranging and provocative meditations on chaos. This is an eloquent and utterly delightful book." "The seed aspects of chaos theory are brilliantly integrated in this book into a broad perspective illuminating the nature of deep creativity. Chaos emerges not as a negative force, but as a perpetual and comprehensive creative process linking all aspects of life. I found it electrifying." "John Briggs and F. David Peat are not so much as authors as Zen wizards. As they dart and dance across the stage of their books, butterflies and burbling brooks spring from their fingertips, flow together to become a tumult of clouds at sunset, which (after a moment) we're stunned to recognize as the birth of a galaxy in deep space. When the performance is over, we wonder, 'How on earth did they do that'-and find that, after all, we've somehow caught the knack and are doing it ourselves! "As in their previous work, The Turbulent Mirror, Drs. Peat and Briggs offer us a profound understanding of the creative potential in the individual and the collective psyche. An excellent book." "If you want to know how you can apply the butterfly effect to change everything from your local surroundings to the global ecology, or set up your own feedback loop to improve everything from your career to your relationships, this is a wonderful book to guide you there. The new motto shall be 'better living through chaos.'" "Makes chaos not only understandable but actually usable. These seven lessons are worth taking-and taking to heart." "This book makes science relevant to everyday life, and brings quality, wholeness and imagination into the scientific conversation" "Many of us got into chaos theory because it afforded a new scientific metamodelling and research strategy for investigating more realistic complex processes in nature. As we got involved with it, we became aware of its potential to overflow its mathematical and scientific roots, to join myth, mysticism, poetry, literature, art, religion, and philosophy in providing an interconnected view of the universe, our world, our society, and our selves. It empowered the insights of those domains with a unifying view and discourse that was not totalizing. Briggs and Peat do a wonderful and exciting job in their new book exploring this expansion of the chaos metaphor. I especially loved their attitude toward creativity: "Chaos suggests that instead of resisting life's uncertainties, we should embrace them. . . Painters, poets, and musicians have long known that creativity blossoms when they are participating in chaos." They also point out that this is true of cultural and social institutions; that the liberation of the human spirit depends this flow. This book should help liberate us from the constraints of modern and postmodern society." "There would have been no Jurassic Park without it. There is a perfume named after it. It is chaos, whose theory is the hottest one in science since relativity. The most powerful part of its allure is the relevance of chaos theory to human life struggles, yet no earlier book more than alluded to that connection. Briggs and Peat, whose Turbulent Mirror (1990) is one of the best popular books on the science of chaos (Briggs also wrote the lavish Fractals (1992) on chaos art), now give us a book that introduces the major ideas of chaos and shows how they can be used metaphorically. For instance, sensitive dependence upon initial conditions, or the butterfly effect, is the phenomenon of a tiny action, when amplified throughout a system, having unexpectedly disporportionate effects. (It is called butterfly after the chaos theory canard that a butterfly flapping its wings in China can cause a thunderstorm--or hurricane--in New York.) Apply this to politics, say, and apparently small initiatives can produce enormous changes. Briggs and Peat are careful to differentiate between scientific fact and metaphor, unlike some popular but often inaccurate self-help writers. The combination of factual exactitude and imaginative application makes this the best book on chaos yet." |
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