Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen

by Mark Buchanan

Book Overview

Critically acclaimed science journalist, Mark Buchanan tells the fascinating story of the discovery that there is a natural structure of instability woven into the fabric of our world, which explains why catastrophes-- both natural and human-- happen. Scientists have recently discovered a new law of nature and its footprints are virtually everywhere-- in the spread of forest fires, mass extinctions, traffic jams, earthquakes, stock-market fluctuations,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0609809989
• ISBN13: 9780609809983
• Release Date: November 2002
• Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.61 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

hidden systems

One of the ways I judge a book's worth to me is how often I think about it during the day, and in the days after I've finished it, and if it has added a valuable viewpoint reference. This book has scored high on that scale. This is a book that will present a new way of viewing, something to think about, and I think most would enjoy reading it. The first reviewer had an excellent synopsis of the substance of the points of the book.I am intrigued by systems thinking and explanations, a way to distill the random patterns of whatever a person is dealing with in their daily life, from the rare to the mundane. I was fascinated with the modeled games presented and how they illuminate the heart of the underlying mathematical "engine" that permeates our world. To see these findings correlate with the recent face of physics theories was compelling. I had recently finished "The hole in the Universe" by K.C. Cole, and thought about the condition of our universe being in a particular "frozen" state of conditions and how it's possible that that state could be "kicked down" to another "rung" on the ladder-not predictable as to when or under what conditions. It seemed to be a reiteration of these principles, seen on an immense scale.This picture could be disconcerting as to the randomness of chaos potential, but at the same time it presents a view of the dynamism of life and possibilities, how it can't be any other way if we are able to move and have effect and not live in a static world.How does this affect one's world view? It's the same as if you haven't read the book; navigate through as best you can, and appreciate life.

A clear presentation of a crucial idea

Who hasn't wondered why catastrophes happen, and if they can be predicted or avoided? Economists and investors try to understand why markets crash, seismologists struggle to understand and predict great earthquakes, and historians speculate why empires crumble and global cataclysms such as the First and Second World Wars occur.Physicist and science journalist Mark Buchanan brings the science of what he calls "historical physics"--the study of systems that are far from equilibrium and, as he puts it poised "on the knife edge of instability" to bear on these questions.He describes a much-studied model of such catastrophe-prone systems, a simple sandpile. Build a sandpile by dropping one grain at a time on the top of the heap. It will eventually reach a critical state at which a grain can either make the pile a bit taller or start an avalanche, small or large. Scientists experimenting with real and virtual sandpiles have observed several important regularities:1. The time between avalanches is extremely variable, making it essentially impossible to predict when the next avalanche will occur.2. The size of avalanches is also extremely variable, making it essentially impossible to predict whether the next avalanche will be tiny or huge.3. A big avalanche doesn't need a big cause; one grain can trigger a sandpile-flattening event.4. Avalanche sizes follow what mathematicians call a power law. What that means is that large events happen less frequently than small ones according to a fixed ratio. For sandpiles the frequency goes down by a factor of 2.14 for each doubling of avalanche size. For earthquakes the frequency goes down by a factor of four for each doubling of released energy.5. Any process that follows a power law shows two key features. The events are "scale invariant," meaning that no particular size of event is favored. And large events--big avalanches, 8.0 earthquakes, "1000-year floods" and many other kinds of catastrophic events occur far more frequently than common sense would suggest.We tend to assume that events distribute themselves along the familiar normal curve--like height, weight, IQ scores, etc. These distributions do have a favored scale--most people cluster around the average height, weight, or IQ, while the number of people with extremely low or extremely high scores is very small.Buchanan shows that many events that greatly impact our lives represent changes in sandpile-like systems, and so are not just hard to predict, but inherently unpredictable. The one thing that can be predicted is that huge events will occur far more often than our intuition prepares us for.Many natural events follow power laws, including earthquakes, forest fires, floods and the mass extinctions that have punctuated the history of life on earth. And many human events also show these regularities, including traffic jams, market crashes, the collapse of nations and empires, and wars.Buchanan's presentation of these regularities and their implications i

A model of clarity -- simply superb

Since other reviewers have described the book in some detail, I will not attempt to duplicate their efforts. (As to the reviewer who thinks that power laws with integral exponents are somehow more convincing than power laws with non-integral exponents, I can only suggest that Nature may not share his prejudices.) Buchanan writes with incredible clarity. I'm reading the book for the second time and am really appreciating the economy of prose. Buchanan is not selling snake oil, he judiciously weighs the evidence and points you to the literature if you want more. On the dust jacket Per Bak, a founding father and wonderfully clear writer on self-organizing criticality himself, says that he wishes that he had written the book. I know exactly what he means. I eagerly look forward to Buchanan's next book on the science of networks and highly recommend this one.

a book for everyone

This book is about science, all sciences and how they fail to predict the future. For example, why can't we predict earthquakes or a stock market crash. Buchanan provides the answer but also a solution.Well written, easy to read, and for the most part, nonscientific language.

The Physics of History

CERTAIN complex systems, under certain circumstances, have been discovered to behave in mathematically simple, similar ways. In 'critical states', there is no reason to look for specific causes of great events. The smallest force can have gigantic effects and sudden upheavals can strike seemingly out of nowhere. The approximate frequency of such upheavals can be predicted, but not when they will happen or what size they will be.Mark Buchanan's book reviews the current work on the subject to highlight a deep similarity between the upheavals that affect our lives in both physical and human systems. The book warmly communicates this novel way of thinking without compromising scientific integrity. This is made possible because the author is not only a science writer but also a physicist.Buchanan starts by discussing the principle of ubiquity which is that one should focus on the simplest mathematical game belonging to a same universal class. Details are not important in deciding the outcome because things in a critical state have no inherent typical scale in either time or space. The important issue which this book highlights is that in a critical state, something known as a `power law' comes into play to reveal a hidden order and simplicity behind complexity. A power law means that there is no such thing as a normal or typical event, and that there is no qualitative difference between the larger and smaller fluctuations.Buchanan illustrates this with the following example. If one takes a handful of rice (or sand) and drops the grains one by one on to a table top, a pile of rice is built soon. The pile will not grow taller for ever, though. Eventually the addition of one more grain will cause an avalanche. Such a grain is only special because it happened to fall in the right place at the right time. The addition of a single grain may have no effect, precipitate a small avalanche, or collapse the whole structure. One can predict the likely frequency of the avalanches, but not when they will happen or what size each will be. It may come as no surprise that big avalanches occur less frequently than small ones. What is surprising is that there is a power law: each time the size of an avalanche of rice grains is doubled, it becomes twice as rare.The book reveals that power laws have been discovered for events ranging from forest fires and earthquakes to mass extinctions and stock market crashes. This is the power law for forest fires: when the area covered by a fire is doubled, it becomes about 2.48 times as rare. If the size of an earthquake is doubled, these quakes become four times less frequent. The bigger the quake, the rarer it is. The distribution is scale invariant, that is, what triggers small and large quakes is precisely the same. A power law for the distribution of extinction sizes (that fits the fossil record well) happens to be identical to that for earthquakes: every time the size of an extinction (as measured by the number of