Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book

Chance and Chaos

Rate this book
How do scientists look at chance, or randomness, and chaos in physical systems? In answering this question for a general audience, Ruelle writes in the best French tradition: he has produced an authoritative and elegant book--a model of clarity, succinctness, and a humor bordering at times on the sardonic.

214 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

31 people are currently reading
458 people want to read

About the author

David Ruelle

28 books15 followers
David Pierre Ruelle is a Belgian mathematical physicist, naturalized French. He has worked on statistical physics and dynamical systems. With Floris Takens, Ruelle coined the term strange attractor, and developed a new theory of turbulence.

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
72 (21%)
4 stars
118 (35%)
3 stars
116 (34%)
2 stars
23 (6%)
1 star
5 (1%)
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
Profile Image for DJ.
317 reviews294 followers
July 4, 2009
This book goes down like a high school cafeteria salad bar - plenty of variety but overwhelmingly mediocre.

It seems as though Ruelle simply sat down one Saturday and thought, "Hey, I think I'll write a book" and proceeded to regurgitate his stream of consciousness onto paper for the next several hours. Ruelle gives a somewhat shallow introduction to a huge variety of interesting topics but jumps from one to the next so fast that nothing sticks. "Chance and Chaos" reads more like a series of blog posts than a unified book. This book might be useful to someone who has never heard of a Turing machine, algorithmic complexity, or sensitive dependence on initial conditions but those who have will likely walk away unsatisfied.

Ruelle also harbors an odd obsession with Freudian psychoanalysis and awkwardly cites it as often as possible. I had thought Freudian psychology held about as much scientific clout as intelligent design but perhaps it's still quite a contender in continental Europe.

On the upside, Ruelle is an entertaining writer and offers many interesting and effective analogies for difficult concepts as well as an abundance of color commentary and stories on how science is (or should be) done. I plan on looking into some of his more focused and rigorous texts and papers on statistical physics and chaos, as I suspect he might shine when reined in a bit.

And so, my search for good popular books on information and chaos continues...
Profile Image for Sinan Canan.
20 reviews65 followers
August 23, 2013
Başlangıç için iyi bir kitap değil fakat kaos teorisi üzerine fikir egzersizi yapmak isteyenler için ideal.
Profile Image for Lloyd Downey.
759 reviews
February 11, 2023
This is a curious book. Curious because some of the topics are hard to grasp. Curious because Ruelle tells some rather colourful stories about some of the characters in it ...such as Godel and Theophile de Donder. And curious because of the sheer breadth of subjects/topics that are covered. These range from mathematics and physics, to the probabilities of coin tosses, sensitive dependence, turbulence...and Ruelle's role in developing the ideas of chaos; economics, quanta, entropy and irreversibility, information theory and Godel's theorem. Each of these sections is written more or less like a stand-alone essay...though there is some dependence on previous sections. Anyway, It's hard to summarise and do it justice. But I'll pluck out a few gems. Because of sensitive dependence slightly different initial conditions can lead to vey different outcomes ....illustrated really well with a billiard ball analogy. But scaled-up this means that with meteorology, it takes about a week for errors to become unacceptable and Ruelle claims that we already know that we shall not be able to predict the weather for more than one or two weeks in advance. I notice that, in 1968, Ruelle was trying to teach himself hydrodynamics by reading the book "Fluid Mechanics" by Landau and Lifshitz. I was trying to do the same thing at more or less the same time ....maybe a bit earlier .....but certainly with less success. (A difficult book).
A great story about Godel. Somebody had briefly occupied his office while he was away and had left a polite note saying "I hope to have the chance to get to know you more intimately on a later occasion"....he received a response from Godel which consisted of the note with that sentence underlined bye Godel and, added, in pencil, the question "Exactly what do you mean?" Ruelle describes him as "a small man yellowish, and emaciated and he wore cotton plugs in his ears". Another story about the French mathematician Jean Leray who told Ruelle that his inspiration for his great 1934 paper on hydrodynamics was watching the vortices of the River Seine as it flows past the piles of the Pont Neuf in Paris. And I've often pondered over the idea that all the molecules in a box....if you wait long enough will randomly arrange themselves all into one corner. Ruelle, does much the same with a layer of hot water poured over a layer of cold....they begin to mix into luke warm water but in principle could return to the two layers of hot and cold. How long would we have to wait....Ruelle just says too long ...and that seems to be much longer than the current age of the universe.
I like the reconciliation between chance and determinism cited by Poincare: "A very small cause, which escapes us, determines a considerable effect which we cannot ignore, and we then say that this effect is due to chance". (Though there was no quantum uncertainty in Poincare's day). And Ruelle has some harsh advice for Economists: "Legislators and government officials are thus faced with the possibility that their decisions, intended to produce a better equilibrium, will, in fact, lead to wild fluctuations, with possibly quite disastrous effects". (I think our Reserve Bank and the Federal Reserve should take notice...and I recall a friend of mine, then working in the Treasury Department in about 1990 saying that there were room-fulls of economists there who had run out of ideas about what action could be taken to fix the high inflation and high unemployment ).
As I said at the start....a curious book. But interesting and as I've been re-reading it to write this review, I've come to appreciate it more...even if it is difficult to summarise. I give it 5 stars.
1 review
May 3, 2021
Eu geralmente não faço reviews de livros, justamente pelo fato de eu não confiar muito no meu poder de julgamento literário. Porém, sinto que esse livro do David Ruelle despertou em mim essa segurança (ou insegurança, não sei julgar ainda) de fazer uma análise do mesmo.
Para começar, o próprio autor já define no prefácio que matematicamente é um livro muito superficial, sendo levantadas questões com uma profundidade mínima para uma exposição suficientemente detalhada. E isso ele faz, eu diria até com uma graciosidade especial, neste quesito o autor está de parabéns em sua exposição matemática, não sendo nada cansativa, extensa ou complicada demais para um leitor com o ensino médio completo. E toda a matemática que ele diretamente mostra (pois, indiretamente, debate questões de outros autores aos quais ele sempre introduz a referência bibliográfica) tem um papel importantíssimo nos debates de cada capítulo.
O meu problema com o texto é mesmo a exposição escrita do Ruelle, eu tenho uma concepção que nem todo cientista dos ramos das ciências exatas tem um poder expositivo, uma presença-de-palco-literária, boa o suficiente para se fazer notado. E nesse livro, pelo menos na primeira metade do livro, achei muito rasa. Senti que haviam buracos que estavam sendo ignorados, e entre os que foram abordados, senti que muitos não foram suturados bem o suficiente. E não é uma questão com o próprio Ruelle, pois ele na segunda parte do livro claramente mostra esse poder de escrita (a comparação de buracos negros com o inferno de Dante eu achei genial).
Apesar dos pesares, isso tudo seriam as características de um livro de 4 estrelas para mim, porém como podem ver, houve uma subtração de uma estrela. E de onde vem isso? Eu poderia dizer em termos técnicos que os atratores do autor não eram caótios, mas sempre periódicos. A exposição sobre teoria do caos foi bem breve (e vindo de um dos criadores dela, me surpreendeu a total vedação do tema), toda vez que parecia ir para esse ponto o autor fazia um "eterno retorno" ao acaso. A exposição do acaso foi muito maior do que a do caos, até em momentos que eu conseguia ver onde ambos tinham uma correlação forte. Enfim, é um livro que retrata mais a inexatidão das ciências exatas, e para esse quesito, ele é tão exato quanto uma coisa inexata poderia ser.
Profile Image for Brent Velthoen.
4 reviews2 followers
April 4, 2022
There is a certain weariness in Ruelle's account of chance. The naive point of view is that physics is like mathematics. Physicists discover laws of nature, just as mathematicians discover theorems. In practice, however, as Ruelle reminds us, physics is messy. The language of physics is mathematics, but the most that a physicist can hope for is to express relationships among quantities in mathematical terms that correspond or match what is observed in nature. Sometimes, especially at the atomic level, there is uncertainty. The best the physicist can do is to make a prediction based on probability. Enter chance. Fundamentally, then, chance is not a mysterious force animating the universe; it is a reflection of our ignorance. This is not to say that physicists (and other scientists and applied mathematicians) haven't done a good job eliminating uncertainty or at least restricting it to a smaller and smaller domain (i.e. chaos theory is one area that paradoxically reduces chance by explaining seemingly random behavior by small changes in initial conditions of deterministic processes), but there is little hope of eliminating chance altogether. Ruelle expands pessimistically that our cognitive framework (i.e. our brain), based on evolution, is not suited for such investigations into the fundamental nature of reality. One consequence of explaining the role of chance in such a way is to remove one source of nondeterminism. If everything is governed by deterministic processes, is there still room for free will? No worries, says Ruelle, uncertainty can serve as its own source of freedom. What we don't know, we can't reduce to physical causes, so there may be freedom. This convenient explanation is rather unconvincing.
1 review
August 15, 2020
It seems the topics are well designed and written but very hard to understand all of the paragraphs even you are an interested reader and "very technical references" are avoided in common content. But I think you can understand it totally when the notes part, which is included in the end of the book, begins to make sense to you probably because you are a physicist and or mathematician.

It is funny because I had intended to read this book when I was 14 years old, but luckily I could not reached it on those days but it has remained in my mind for 20 years, never forget it and finally read it. For sure, the notes parts does not make any sense to me because i am not an expert on mathematics.


Also, I wonder the author's current views on the theory mentioned in the first parts of Chapter 21 considering the covid19 situation. So we still sure that "unfriendly aliens" or "crazy scientists" could not guess correctly the message of the genetic codes of a virus, is that right? I hope.. And I hope he will read this and may create an account and write his comments and we can learn his precious views.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Ekrem.
19 reviews
September 7, 2020
Kitap boyunca yer yer bir popüler bilim kitabı için bile oldukça yüzeysel, ayrıntılardan uzak denilebilecek bir anlatımla bir çok fizik ve matematik konusuna değiniliyor.Tabii ki bu yüzeysel anlatımın kitabın hedef kitlesi göz önüne alarak yapılan bilinçli bir tercih olduğunu da unutmamak gerek.
<
24 reviews
February 18, 2021
This book tries to assert the place of probability, chance and information in the nature of reality, both relating to biological life and the physical universe. There are some definitely interesting philosophical nuggets, and there are interspersed with amusingly sarcastic descriptions of the practice of scientists and science. However, although there are many related topics, each given a short chapter, I think I missed the unifying purpose of the book. Maybe my fault? It does make me want to understand thermodynamics better. The discussions of ergodicity, recurrence and irreversibility were intriguing.
Profile Image for Stan.
17 reviews
April 24, 2019
A brief and exciting overview of some very interesting areas in physics and mathematics. The brevity of the chapters was very enjoyable, and helped to segment the numerous topics covered. Ruelle writes in a conversational manner, which makes this non-technical introduction very easy to read, especially for the uninitiated. The book reads at once as a history of modern interpretations of probability, chaos theory, and science in general, and also as a celebration of the human drive to discover, complete with brief and enjoyable tangents about personal experiences as a mathematical scientist.
Profile Image for Alian.
44 reviews
September 28, 2024
it touched on a lot of general topics without going too in depth and i'm still trying to decide if i liked or disliked that. i feel like anyone without a math background can still enjoy/get something out of this book. easy proofs
Profile Image for Hakan Guveli.
233 reviews3 followers
December 30, 2018
Karışık bir anlatım, say yayınlarının popüler bilim çevirileri tat vermiyor.
Profile Image for Özgür.
88 reviews1 follower
April 8, 2019
Konulara yüzeysel de olsa aşina olmayan kişiler için okuması zor olabilecek bir kitap. Gene de ben beğendim. Yalnız basımdan kaynaklı epeyce yazım hatası var, o nedenle 3 veriyorum.
Profile Image for Baran.
39 reviews
November 16, 2022
A very good and intuitive introduction to statistical mechanics
Profile Image for Charles Daney.
78 reviews28 followers
October 31, 2016
David Ruelle's book is only 166 pages (excluding the extensive notes). In that space it covers an astonishing number of related topics. However, for a general reader interested in chaos and complexity theory, it's not the best place to start. Topics such as "strange attractors" and the "butterfly effect" came to public attention with James Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science almost 3 decades ago. Since then many books on the subject for general readers have appeared, such as John Gribbin's Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Complexity. I'd recommend either or these or similar books as a suitable place to get into the subject.

The discussion in the book under review here is able to be concise for two reasons. Firstly, it assumes some acquaintance with basic physics. Comfort with college-level mathematics is helpful but less essential, since the details are mostly confined to footnotes at the end of the book. Secondly, there is no attempt to go into much depth on any of the topics. Instead, the reader gets a lucid bird's-eye view of each topic, and the various threads that connect together the theory and potential applications.

Here's an incomplete list of the topics that are touched upon: determinism, probability, game theory, turbulence in fluid flow, sensitive dependence on initial conditions, strange attractors, chaos, economics, quantum theory and indeterminacy, entropy, irreversibility, statistical mechanics, phase transitions, information theory, complexity, computability, biological evolution and the importance of sexual reproduction, and intelligence. (If one wants to quickly find references to each topic, it's unfortunate that the book lacks an index.)

Ruelle, a mathematical physicist, is very well qualified to write on the physics-based topics. He was an important contributor to the theories of turbulence and statistical mechanics, and shares credit for the term "strange attractor". (An "attractor" is a relatively stable state towards which a dynamical system may evolve. It is "strange" if it has a fractal structure.) Gleick's book (Chaos: Making a New Science) mentions Ruelle frequently and explains his contributions.

I give the book a top rating for its clarity and breadth, in spite of its brevity. It provides a fine orientation for a reader who wants to pursue any of its topics more deeply.
Profile Image for Chris.
10 reviews2 followers
April 29, 2011
This was a bit of an odd read. It started out well, very comprehensible and quite interesting, addressing the topic at hand effectively. It certainly sparked my already present interest in the topic of (mathematical) chaos. However as the book went on, it began to wander quite a bit, and near the end it almost felt like the author's mind wasn't quite there. There is a point where the author goes off on a tangent about how the reader clearly no longer wants responsibility for the creation of the universe... it comes off as quite odd and out of place, and the last several chapters offer only bits and pieces of interesting or useful information.

The book is certainly enough to give one an idea of what chaos is in mathematics (and to an extent in a few specific other fields), but it should be noted that it does not attempt to actually teach it (which could never be done in so few pages). In the goal of explaining it, I would say that the book does a decent job. What the book could really have used, however, is an editor who could detect and help to correct the points where the book begins to wander off its trail and keep the whole thing on topic and interesting.
Profile Image for Bria.
954 reviews82 followers
January 14, 2012
It took me probably three-quarters of this book to be able to even begin to form any sort of opinion on it, and I'm still not entirely sure, although I think it comes out on the side of "enjoyable, if not entirely fruitful". It does sort of seem like Ruelle just decided one day to write it, and only gradually sort of got into it and started to get more playful as it went on. This may not be quite right, but the term that comes to mind is "the poor man's Douglas Hofstadter". He covers a wide range of topics by showing how they all really have to do with each other and are intermingled, but instead of delving into these fascinating connections, just barely brushes by them as he rushes through the expansive array he has taken on. Perhaps he is hoping to just get his hooks into people to whom these subjects and ideas are news, and give them just enough to encourage them to read further in other, more substantive books. Since none of the topics in this book are new to me, but I have no real knowledge of any of them either, it's difficult for me to get a handle on how much one who was unfamiliar with them could really learn from reading it.
Profile Image for Maurizio Codogno.
Author 67 books145 followers
November 15, 2010
Si sente subito che questo relativamente vecchio testo sulla casualità, dal titolo che sicuramente rende meglio in italiano che nell'originale è stato scritto da un fisico. Lo stile è indubbiamente diverso da quanto avrebbe fatto un matematico, e credo che il lettore curioso lo troverà sicuramente accettabile, ancora di più al giorno d'oggi: avere capitoli brevissimi, di poche pagine ciascuno, aiuta la lettura. L'approccio alla matematica del caos è a mio parere reso molto bene, partendo dal caso e mostrando come caso e caos non sono affatto la stessa cosa. Ho trovato molto interessante la parte centrale, dove il concetto di entropia è spiegato in maniera diversa dal solito e soprattutto viene fatto un parallelo molto interessante tra la visione classica e quella quantistica; non ho capito perché anche Ruelle - ma dev'essere una mania dei fisici - decida poi di fare metafisica nelle ultime pagine del libro, che si possono tranquillamente trascurare. Nulla da eccepire sulla traduzione: ma com'è che Libero Sosio ha anche tradotto dal francese, e non solo dall'inglese?
Profile Image for Alex.
26 reviews2 followers
April 29, 2012
This thin book has a lot of interesting ideas in it but if you want a book about chaos this one is probably not the best one to start with.
While the concept of chaos appears multiple times the book reads more as a sequence of loosely connected articles rather than a book. The topics covered include quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, probability theory, chaos theory and even information theory, a bit too much at the same time i believe.
It's easy to pick up and read though as you can choose the chapters you fancy and learn something new - the book also has a notes section which expand on the topics in chapters in more detail for a more scientifically-inclined reader.
30 reviews
February 18, 2016
This book is a gentle introduction into chance chaos and complexity. If your new to the subject its a nice book to read. I really hate that all the interesting stuff is banned to the end of the book in the notes. That is what everyone does these days. Other than that its a nice broad introduction. The book is beginning to show its age now. It somehow feels a bit old fashioned but not insomuch that it is annoying.
Profile Image for Yassin Bousaadi.
11 reviews
November 30, 2016
A short book about mathematical and scientific discoveries.
The book is made as clear as possible yet it's still rich enough in thoughts to make us, mere readers, wonder about the law of universe. While the book is not made to learn the principles evoqued in this book, you get to understand them and the philosophical implications of each law which is already a lot.

9 reviews2 followers
February 25, 2015
Excellent overview of a variety of theoretical topics, not as basic as most pop sci books. One of the best Endnotes sections I've ever read.
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews

Can't find what you're looking for?

Get help and learn more about the design.