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Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order
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Customer Reviews
Rating:  - not great...
It covers a lot of topics and some of them are entertaining. But seems unfocused and hard to get a big picture.
Rating: - A disappointment
Author Steve Strogatz's book "Sync" ostensibly concerns the spontaneous synchronization of oscillators, where an "oscillator" is anything that exhibits periodic behavior -- be it a clock, a flashing firefly, or an electron in a superconductor.
The book is clearly modeled on James Gleick's book "Chaos": both books follow various researchers who originally work in isolation but who gradually recognize that they are investigating different aspects of the same phenomenon. As Gleick did for chaos, Strogatz tries to portray spontaneous synchronization as a fundamental, unifying phenomenon in nature. However, many of Strogatz's examples are unimpressive: sleep patterns, the coordinated flashing of lightning bugs, etc. In the more important cases -- the heart's pacemaker cells, phase transitions -- the mechanisms' details haven't been elucidated, so it's not clear how synchronization actually operates. Gradually Strogatz wanders: He argues that in order to progress, science should abandon its traditional analytic approach of investigating the bits of a system and instead should investigate the interactions between the bits; in this connection, he discusses the game "6-degrees of separation," in which very different people are "linked" by chains of acquaintances.
(Strogatz also follows Gleick's footnote format, which is a nuisance.)
In reading this book, I had hoped to find deep insights from a principal investigator in the field; instead, I found entertainment for the math-phobic.
Rating:  - Resonance
What I found most interesting about Strogatz's sync theory was the position that it did not require an extensive measure of complexity in order to achieve synchronization. It merely required a critical mass or critical repetition in order to effectuate a phase transformation. The phenomenon of resonance performs similarly. Synchronization may be a form of resonance which has been overlooked, thus far, in our reality (biosphere).
Rating:  - Heavy Science for Light Readers
What a fun book. Strogatz has managed to talk about the leading edge of mathematical modeling without a single equation! He uses a comfortable prose and never strays too far from the story of his research. The reader is treated to a view of the way that the world network of scientists organizes itself within areas of research and finds unions where research from one speciality can contribute to another. Who would have thought that the western power grid, the Internet Movie Database and the nervous system of a worm called C. elegans could be effectively modeled with the same operational principles.
Rating: - Sync: The pulse of creation
In his 1987 book Chaos, James Gleick noted that choatic systems produce periodic patches of order.
At that time and during that state of research, the answer to the question of why this should be so remained largely unresolved. And to be honest, after reading this book and learning about the sync or synchronicity of how fireflies light up the night in unison and how inanimate pendulums can come to swing in unison the question will be still be largely unresolved.
However, you will leave this book with some additional interesting food for thought.
Why do periodic patches of order emerge in choatic systems?
Well, one answer suggested seems to be that if that chaotic system produces periodic amounts of a like particle -- like an electron -- that those like particles can generally be relied upon to behave similarly. Then maybe it's the delicate calculus of these mutually constitued similar behaviors that helps give rise to the rise of order.
But maybe not...and such is the state of research into this important issue.
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