Synopses & Reviews
I found this most unusual book to be very stimulating. It really did achieve its objective of breaking academic barriers and showing how researchers in different disciplines are grappling with the same difficulties in using different conceptual and practicalmethodologies, and in explaining their results... I found many aspects of my own thinking about fluid mechanics and the philosophy of science changing as I read the book and discussed it with colleagues and friends.--Julian C. R. Hunt, reviewing the French edition.
Synopsis
In Chaos and Determinism, members of the French Academy from several disciplines -- including fluid mechanics, economics, philosophy, theoretcial physics and biology -- offer scientific and philosophical analyses of the concepts of order, chaos, and determinism as they emerge in such complex systems as atmosphere, oceans, monetary economic, s and biological organisms. Using turbulence in fluid mechanics as the chief model, the authors describe and explain the behavior of systems that tend toward a particular end-state, such as an attractor in dynamic systems. The result is a unique interdisciplinary study of complex behavior and its philosophical consequences in fluid mechanics, meteorology, oceanography, physics, embryology, genetics, and economics.