Cranston Public Library

"The author describes how scientists studying the growth of complexity in nature are discovering order and pattern in chaos. He explains concepts such as nonlinearity, the Butterfly Effect, universal constants, fractals, and strange attractors, and examines the work of scientists such as Mitchell J. Feigenbaum, Edward Lorenz, and Benoit Mandelbrot." --

Connie Willis has won more awards than anyone else in SF and fantasy for her work. Her skill is convincingly reinforced in this novella that combines such disparate subjects as chaos theory, sheep-raising and true love. Willis slyly lampoons society's herd mentality as she weaves the tale of a statistician and a scientist whose collaboration produces hilarious results, and may lead them to the stunning breakthrough for which they've been searching. "Sandra...

"A social scientist dispels people's tidy versions of reality and delves deeply into the theories of random chance and chaos to demonstrate that the world really works through random events that can alter the trajectory of our lives."--

"From the 2021 Nobel Prize winner in Physics, an enlightening and personal journey into the practice of groundbreaking science In In a Flight of Starlings, already a #1 bestseller in his native Italy, celebrated physicist Giorgio Parisi guides us through his unorthodox yet exhilarating work: investigating the principles of physics by observing the flight of flocks of birds. Studying the movements of these communities, he has realized, proves an illuminating...

Patterns are everywhere in nature--in the ranks of clouds in the sky, the stripes of an angelfish, the arrangement of petals in flowers. Where does this order and regularity come from? As Philip Ball reveals in Nature's Patterns: A Tapestry in Three Parts, this order creates itself. The patterns we see come from self-organization. Indeed, scientists have found that there is a pattern-forming tendency inherent in the basic structure and processes of...

The hero is John Bandicut, a space adventurer with an implanted quarx which can predict and prevent cataclysms. In this escapade he travels to a world to destroy an evil immaterial entity. Only problem is, in destroying it he might destroy the memory of what brought him to that world in the first place. By the author of Neptune Crossing.