Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Your final book is James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science
James Gleick is a former science writer for the New York Times and in this book he describes the science of chaos, and how complex systems can also be interpreted in terms of simple rules and simple (but interacting) behaviours. For example, he examines Edward Lorenz’s butterfly effect. I love this part because it is something that pretty much everyone has experience of in everyday life, but never in their introductory physics class.
The cliché is the weather where you can imagine that the tiniest, tiniest change in the weather in New Jersey would affect the weather in London down the line because the entire system is linked. If one system has slightly lower pressure, the rest of the system reacts. Another example is, imagine you are on the top of a pyramid-shaped mountain and you put a little ball on top. The tiniest wind will determine which side of the pyramid the ball rolls down. The theory basically says that many systems will respond completely differently depending on tiny changes in their initial conditions. And this idea is something we have to keep in mind, for example, when we study Earth history. For example, if we look at climate change, the tiniest change can alter things and, most importantly, the size of the change doesn’t have to scale with its consequences. A relevant example today is the stability of the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice sheets. So far, they have remained stable while the climate has warmed over the last century. Will a small change somewhere on Earth destabilise one of the ice sheets, cause a chain reaction, and flood coastal cities around the world?
In my group we don’t practise chaos theory mathematically, but we practise it when it comes to creativity and observation all the time. We just keep in mind that not every process is some simple isolated linear system that you can set up as a physics experiment.
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Adam Maloof is assistant professor of geology at Princeton University. He spent his childhood summers in Newfoundland and Maine and his interests centre on the relationship between ancient life, climate and geography. He says the most valuable piece of information missing in studies of the modern climate system is a deep understanding of Earth’s past. No one would ever study modern political science without a basic understanding of human history and civilisation, and no one would ever study a modern animal without a basic understanding of evolution. It is the same with the climate and Earth history, the only problem is that you have to study nature and not books to understand Earth history.
