Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life

At once elegant and riveting, Sync tells the story of the dawn of a new science. Steven Strogatz, a leading mathematician in the fields of chaos and complexity theory, explains how enormous systems can synchronize themselves, from the electrons in a superconductor to the pacemaker cells in our hearts. He shows that although these phenomena might seem unrelated on the surface, at a deeper level there is a connection, forged by the unifying power of mathematics.

Reviewer: Mark Lamendola, IEEE Senior Member and author of over 3500 articles.

Two thumbs up! This entertaining and informative book is one of the few I would read twice. You know those lists of books you'd want to have if you were stranded on a desert island? Sync made my list.

While Sync is fact-filled, it's far from dry. Throughout the text, Strogatz made me laugh out loud-reminding me very much of the engaging, "can't put it down" writing style used by Bill Bryson (author of Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail and The Lost Continent).

Strogatz takes a complex topic, and explains it in a way that even folks with no innate interest in the topic will find enjoyable. I learned quite a bit about how and why everything from atoms to planets will suddenly act in unison-or not do so. My newly-gained understanding of the relationship between sleep cycles and body temperature cycles has already helped me make some positive changes. Then there's the explanation of traffic....
Not once did Strogatz use an intimidating equation-or any equation at all. Instead, he treats the reader to rich metaphors, analogies, and examples. And instead of dry history on how sync got where it is today, Strogatz shares the frustrations, peculiarities, and human drama of the people behind the developments. Strogatz keeps a pace that is more in line with a Tom Clancy novel than a book focused on a science topic.

The ending made me go back to the beginning-to the dedication, actually. I never cared about dedications, before. However this one really meant something to me after I read Sync. Strogatz dedicated Sync to his departed friend Art Winfree, without whom Strogatz would never have taken his fabulous journey and without whom such a marvelous book would not have been possible.


Great treatise on synchronization and natural order   March 16, 2003
Harold McFarland (Florida)
94 out of 104 found this review helpful

"Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order" is a dissertation on synchronization and its place in the universe. Standard entropy theory has always indicated that a system that is orderly will, over time, move to a position of less and less organization. However, that is not always consistent with observations in real life. Steven Strogatz does an inspired job of describing how synchronization exists in such small areas as fireflies and plant leaves to much larger concepts of the universe and the asteroid belt in our solar system.

One of the more fascinating sections of the book deals with synchronization in human beings. It covers current research in areas such as sleep rhythms, circadian rhythms, the tendency for women to match menstrual cycles over time, body temperature rhythms, and various other normal cycles of the human experience.

This is a very academically oriented text that many with only a passing interest in such things might find too detailed and scientific for their likes. On the other hand, for those with a keen interest in the cycles of the natural world and current research into this emerging field this is one of the foremost texts on the subject. It is a highly recommended read for anyone with a desire to learn about how natural tendencies toward synchronization move us to spontaneous order.


Strogatz beats Wolfram 10-0   March 31, 2003
93 out of 103 found this review helpful

When you have a flight to catch early in the morning, you'd like to sleep early in the evening. You go to bed but you stay awake until your usual bedtime. When you stay up for a late party, you'd like to sleep in until noon. But you wake up tired and can't fall back asleep. Why can't you sleep for as long as you need to? Why can't you fall asleep when you want to? The culprit is a small cluster of neurons right at the bottom of your brain.
These cells have the amazing power to synchronize their activity to each other and to the cycle of day and night. Their combined effect is to regulate your bodily functions along a fixed 24-hour cycle. Your body temperature, hormone secretions, and a myriad other functions are regulated by this internal clock. And so is your sleep-wake cycle. Your day contains two "forbidden zones," for most people around 10 am and 10 pm, when your brain dictates that you can hardly fall asleep. Slightly after lunch your brain says it's a good time for a nap, as so many cultures discovered on their own. Between 3:00 and 6:00 am, it's so hard to stay awake that shift workers call this time the "zombie zone". Most catastrophic accidents that depend on human error, like Three Miles Island and Chernobyl, occur at this time.

For all of their importance in helping people sleep well and avoid accidents, understanding the neural clock is among the most difficult problems facing science today. It requires understanding how thousands of cells, connected together in complicated ways, manage to coordinate their behavior. New mathematical concepts have been developed over the last few decades to tackle this kind of problem. Synchronization is exhibited by stock markets, brains, and many other things we'd love to understand better. Studying synchronization is part of the larger enterprise of understanding complexity. One of this field's pioneers is Steven Strogatz. His book Sync is the first popular introduction to this groundbreaking investigation. The book is as delightful a read as its topic is timely.

Complexity is fashionable today. Plenty of books about complexity address the general public. In 2002, Stephen Wolfram made a big splash with his A New Kind of Science, in which he argued that complexity demands a radically new scientific approach invented by Wolfram, which uses simple computer programs to understand everything. On close examination, A New Kind of Science turned out to contain few new ideas, and those few turned out to be unpersuasive. To make matters worse, Wolfram's book is repetitive, self-aggrandizing, and poorly written. Like Wolfram's, Strogatz's book is about complexity. Fortunately, the similarities stop here. In every other respect, Sync is diametrically opposite to A New Kind of Science.

In spite of his brilliant achievements, which are documented throughout the book, Strogatz is refreshingly modest. He acknowledges the role of his mentors, colleagues, and students.

Strogatz motivates his choice of topics, links them beautifully to one another, and repeats definitions and explanations when they are needed without ever being verbose. He also respects the general public of nonscientists. He stresses that even the most curiosity-driven scientific research often has life-saving applications. And in his acknowledgements, he thanks the American public for supporting the funding agencies that make science possible. To top it all off, Strogatz is an awesome writer.

PS: Please, let's not attempt to bring intelligent design into serious scientific discussion. Intelligent design is the view that some things were created by one or more non-human intelligent designers. It is a charming hypothesis with no scientific credentials, for the simple reason that there is no scientific evidence that non-human intelligent designers exist, no story about where non-human intelligent designers come from, and no shadow of a theory of how non-human intelligent designers function and manage to create.


FROM FIREFLIES TO THE INTERNET   June 22, 2005
Alwyn Scott (Tucson, Arizona USA)
21 out of 22 found this review helpful

There are three types of science books. First are monographs, written by scientists for their peers, larded with jargon, and incomprehensible to the general public. Second are books by professional science writers, which read like Tuesday's New York Times - glib and flashy but unreliable because the authors depend on interviews of a necessarily small number of scientists. Finally are those few books by scientists who both know the subject and are able to write. Scientifically reliable and well written, Steven Strogatz's "Synch: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life" is in the last category. Inspired by and dedicated to the late Art Winfree - a biologist who had more intuition than most mathematicians - Strogatz gets the excitement of discovering a new field and of learning to do research down onto the page.

In three well-constructed sections, comprising three or four chapters each, the author leads his readers on a grand tour of his research in nonlinear science over the past two decades, from observations of Indonesian fireflies flashing in time with each other, through brain waves, circadian rhythms, coupled pendula, and quantum condensation (lasers, superconductors, and superfluids), to synchronized chaos and the internet. Throughout, helpful metaphors abound and mathematical equations are avoided, while many important ideas are skillfully introduced and the human side of doing science is artfully described.

One factual error should be noted. In chapter seven, it is stated that in 1979 Edward Lorenz introduced the term "butterfly effect" to underscore the sensitive dependence on initial conditions of chaotic systems, whereas the true year was 1972. This error continues to propagate because science writer James Gleick made it in his popular book entitled "Chaos". It's important to get the year right because the 1970s were an amazing decade in which research in nonlinear science exploded from less than a dozen papers a year to more than a dozen a day. Rather than merely commenting on this historic explosion, Lorenz helped to ignite it.

Alwyn Scott
http://personal.riverusers.com/~rover/


Important, profound look at self-organization   April 8, 2003
Alex Iskold (New York)
22 out of 24 found this review helpful

I have been reading popular science books on self-organization and complexity for the past 7 years and I thought that I had quite broad and deep perspective on the field. Dr. Strogatz's book surprised me with its different, yet very simple and profound look at the nature of self-organization and complexity.

At the heart of this book is the idea that order emerges out of chaos by means synchronization. The author takes us on personal, emotional journey through his years as a scientist, and illustrates phenomenon of syncrhonization in the context of biological, chemical, mechanical, quantum mechanical and social-economical systems.