PDF Ebook How Nature Works: the science of self-organized criticality
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How Nature Works: the science of self-organized criticality
PDF Ebook How Nature Works: the science of self-organized criticality
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Review
...[Bak's] book is written with panache. The style is brisk, the content stimulating. -- New Scientist...a must read...essential reading for those interested in complex systems. -- Nature
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About the Author
Per Bak is a professor in the Physics Department of Brookhaven National Laboratory. He has published over 150 papers, including articles in Scientific American and New Scientist.
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Product details
Paperback: 212 pages
Publisher: Copernicus; First Softcover edition (April 23, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 038798738X
ISBN-13: 978-0387987385
Product Dimensions:
6.1 x 0.6 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
3.9 out of 5 stars
27 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#855,027 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Per Bak's 1996 book "How Nature Works: the science of self-organized criticality" is a foundational work in the popularization of complexity, and is still widely read and cited over 20 years after its publication. It is engagingly written, interesting, and persuasive, suggesting that many if not all natural phenomena--from sandpiles to earthquakes, forest fires, extinction events, solar flares, and the human brain--share the characteristics of self-organized criticality. Bak claims that non-periodic catastrophic events, not gradual change, are the main drivers of these phenomena, and that the distribution of these catastrophes (called "avalanches" after his experimental and theoretical studies of sandpiles) follow a power law, reveal a fractal (self-similar) pattern in time and/or space, and form the "basis for emergent phenomena." The idea is that an open, energy-dissipative system with slow energy inputs (like a sandpile with a slow drip of sand onto it) inevitably evolves over a long period of time to become critical, i.e. susceptible to sudden large avalanches. "If this picture is correct, then we must accept instability and catastrophes as inevitable in biology, history, and economics" (p.32).I agree that Bak's work has identified an interesting paradigm that provides a theoretical description of certain classes of natural phenomena, but it really doesn't EXPLAIN much in terms of causation. Bak uses as an illustration the fossil record of extinction events in the last 600 million years, which has many small extinction events and a few very large events. He claims, "Large catastrophic events occur as a consequence of the same dynamics that produces small ordinary everyday events. This observation runs counter to the usual way of thinking about large events, which looks for specific reasons (for instance, a falling meteorite causing the extinction of dinosaurs) to explain large cataclysmic events...Self-organized criticality can be viewed as the theoretical justification for catastrophism" (p.32). But wait a minute! Is he claiming that the meteorite impact was NOT the cause of dinosaur extinction? A huge meteorite crashing into the Caribbean could hardly be called a "small ordinary everyday event"! For the dinosaur extinction to be an example of a catastrophe resulting from a system organizing itself towards criticality one must expand the system to include the Asteroid belt and the Oort cloud and not just the planet Earth. Where does it end?Elsewhere in the book Bak claims that, because long-term records of temperature fluctuations follow a power law distribution, "the apparent increase in temperature might well be a statistical fluctuation rather than an indication of global warming generated by human activity" (p.22). Is the documented great increase in atmospheric CO2 irrelevant, and the atmosphere just happens to be poised for a spike in temperature like a critical sandpile? These kinds of claims for the causative power of SOC are not plausible to me. To explain "how nature works" requires more than a description of a long-term statistical pattern, intriguing though it is. Another objection is that, because self-organized critical systems must evolve for very long times to become critical, they necessarily spend a lot of time in sub-critical states, in which the small inputs do not have cascading catastrophic effects. How do we know whether or not most systems are in such transitional states?Over 20 years of research inspired by Bak's ideas has been reviewed and critiqued recently by scientists largely sympathetic to the paradigm*. They provide a list of the necessary and sufficient conditions for self-organized criticality (SOC), including power law correlations, self-tuning to a continuous phase transition, non-linearity, and presence of "avalanches." In conclusion they state, "There are few systems that display SOC in all its glory, but they do exist and they provide evidence that it works in precisely the way originally envisioned. SOC may be at work in some natural phenomena, such as earthquakes, solar flares and precipitation, but SOC is almost certainly not ubiquitous...it has provided the very fruitful paradigm for a much deeper understanding of the phenomena concerned, as researchers became aware of the distinct possibility that some very simple interactions on a microscopic scale carry over to and evolve across many different time and length scales, effectively providing the same basic physics in rescaled form across many scales" (p.38).I recommend the book, but please read it with critical skepticism...* Watkins, N.W., Pruessner, G., Chapman, S.C. et al. (2016) 25 Years of Self-organized Criticality: Concepts and Controversies. Space Sci Rev 198: 3-44.
This is a really good read for anyone interested in learning more about the mathematics behind nature. Also good for anyone interested in the origin of life or how evolution works. A bit mathy/computer science heavy at times. Worth it though.
Per Bak really deserved to be nominated for Nobel prize for his discovery of self-organized criticality.
I couldn't let the previous reviewer's comments stand without comment. I can't believe the reviewer read the same book that I did. Bak's treatment is detailed, clear, and balanced. When he is enthusiastic he let's you know exactly why, leaving you free to make up your own mind. The fact that most of the studies he describes were published in Physical Review Letters might tell you something about their quality. The book provides wonderful examples of the role of models in science, much better than any I've come across in rather extensive search for materials for a course on the Nature of Science I help teach. I'm reading the book for the third time (not because it is difficult to read, but simply because it repays rereading) and I admire it more with each reading. If you want to understand models that display Self Organized Criticality, this book is without question the place to go.
This book is a great attempt at finding some universality based on systems in a "critical" state, with departures from such state taking place in a manner that follows power laws. The sandpile is a great baby model for that.Some people are critical of Bak's approach, some even suggesting that we may not get power laws in these "sandpile" effects, but something less scalable in the tails. The point is :so what? The man has vision.I looked at the reviews of this book. Clearly a few narrow-minded scientists do not seem to like it (many did not like Per Bak's ego). But the book is remarkably intuitive and the presentation is so clear that he takes you by the hand. It is even entertaining. If you are looking to find flaws in his argument his pedagogy allows it (it is immediately obvious to us who dabble with simulations of these processes that you need an infinite sandpile to get a pure power law).Another problem. I have been ordering the book on Amazon for ages. Copernicus books does not respond to emails. I got my copy at the NYU library. Bak passed away 2 years ago and nobody seems to be pushing for his interest and that of us his readers (for used books to sell for 99 implies some demand). This convinces me NEVER to publish with Springer.
The author is the discoverer of Self-Organized Criticality, and this is a easy and not to long book to read. You will learn about Punctuated Equilibrium,Power Laws,and Fractal Geometry. A sand pile model is used to show self-organized criticality. Mass Extinctions,Stock Market crashes,Earth crust will be presented as critical systems. A must read book for showing how sudden crises or avalanches as the author call's them,and how it affects the world that we live in. Will make you think about sudden rare events in a different way. If you buy this book, I would also recommend buying "Ubiquity" by Mark Buchanan. Together they will help you understand the subject better.
It's a short book that takes a long time to read. He explains topics well and simply. There's very little posturing. What was most interesting to me in the book is the description of the process of scientific discovery. He talks a great deal about finding very simple models, how these simple models often exhibit the behaviour of their much more complicated cousins, about cooperating with others in a cross disciplinary manner, about not be stuck in a dominant paradigm, and about working a problem until it's solved. Very refreshing.
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