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Title: Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness by John Briggs ISBN: 0-06-091696-6 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 06 June, 1990 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.8 (5 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A step deeper guild of Chaos Theory to layman
Comment: I've finished this book's Chinese version today. In the last year, I'm trying my best effort to absorb knowledge of Chaos Theory, Complexity, and Catastrophe Theory. It's quite hard to get a in-depth guild of the above knowledge to common people in Hong Kong.
My purpose to get the above knowledge is just in order to find the hidden order of financial market, and, of course, to make profit from the market. That's why I find this book is good to serve my purpose. It explained clearly on fractals, the relationship between chaos and order, and non-linearness.
I knew E. Peters has using fratals / Elloit Wave Theory to analyze financial market. Of course, it needs more intra-day data to try to find such fratals in a small scale period, e.g. in a 5-minute charts. But I guess that, such fractal are existing in the market, if you watching index movement everyday.
On another aspest, the technique of plotting data in a phase space is a tool to get the picture of financial market to me. This tools can be compared with weighted moving average, MACD, or other technical indicators. Though, phase space analysis is quite uneasy to a man without advanced mathematics. I'm quite sure such mathematical technique may apply to financial trading.
Besides, the idea of "quasi-periodic" is likely describing financial market. Though I got less knowledge from the book on this topic. It sounds like some ideas from William Gann, and other cyclist writings.
Hince, I'm benefitted from the book to enlighten new view point to see the world, and the market. I recommend any financial market practitioner to read this Chaos Theory guild and then reread some technical analysis classics, and reviewing their trading strategies. I believe that shall be worthy in one's trading life.
N.B. The picture 2.7 is missing (P.76), and there is some printing errors in its Chinese version which printed in 20.6.1997
Rating: 1
Summary: Science or Science Fiction
Comment: While this book does make some interesting points about chaos, I found that the book's blatant disregard for accepted science very hard to stomach. I currently attend Harvey Mudd College, a small, but highly regarded science and engineering school, so I like to think that I know something about the subject.
For example, at one point the authors are describing solitons (a term I had never heard before), states a theory that by generating an extra bit of energy we could put the universe out of the unstable equilibrium it currently exists in and cause it to "begin to boil." While this is all well and good, it makes vast assumptions that the authors neglect to mention. Most importantly it assumes that the universe is in an unstable equilibrium, a fact which although highly unlikely is not impossible. Secondly it assumes that the universe is completely clean of these bits of extra energy currently. They draw this parallel to an example of superheating water because without external particles to build upon no bubbles can form to release the steam. This is also true, but it is still impossible because it is impossible to have a perfect system like this. There are always going to be minute cracks in the pot, or imperfections in the water (fractal theory, covered earlier in the book, even states this!), and so while this might be theoretically possible it will not happen in any real world environment. The book has many other places like this where the authors conveniently leave out details that might weaken their arguments. I find this to make the book as a whole very frustrating to read, even if some of their points are valid.
Another reason that I find the book to be very frustrating is that everything is very sensationalized. At the beginning of the description of fractals the authors say that the first person to think of a fractal curve created "a panic among mathematicians that took some fifty years to resolve." I find it truly hard to believe that the entire mathematical community was pulling their collective hair for fifty years trying to explain this curve, but by phrasing it this way the authors make it seem like science as a whole does not want to accept new ideas because it would make them look bad. In reality though I think the scientific community is ready to accept anything that can be strongly proven theoretically, or experimentally (just look at relativity, or quantum).
Because of all of these failings I would not recommend this book. I am sure that there are many other better books about chaos theory that do an excellent job of describing it without disregarding the rest of science, or trying to place it in places where it does not necessarily belong.
Rating: 5
Summary: IGNORE CHAOS AT YOUR PERIL
Comment: Very well thought out survey of chaos theory presents a metaphorical mirror as a means to magnify and project into view the hidden world of turbulence. The advent of the computer has brought chaos and fractals out of the closet. Here the authors teach the reader how to navigate in the turbulent world from the submicroscopic realms to the distant galaxies. The authors dish up a huge concept list: fractal dimensions, strange attractors, holograms, soliton bubbles, bifurcation, quantum phase locking, coevolution of species and the earth as Gaia -- all in an attempt to teach the reader the folly of allowing the part/whole dichotomy to rule your perception of the universe.
The book is a stark attack on those the authors term reductionists -- those who seek answers in breaking the whole into ever smaller parts. The authors' pet writers are David Bohm, Lynn Margulis, and Llya Prigogine but they toss in another hundred ideas for irregular stepping stones to get where they are going. Where is that? They composed an evangelical message -- that man now has the tools and knowledge to step through Alice's Looking Glass into an entirely new and mystical perception of the whole. They see chaos as a source of future evolution and life.
I give the authors a high mark for original thought. Although using a hundred other science writers to frame their ideas, they direct the reader to go beyond existing theories and strike a path for the center of the turbulent mirror. The diagrams and illustrations also were very helpful. They pictured the brain as a strange attractor, with thought arbitrating between the two realms of order and chaos. My favorite metaphor was the slime mold which, when food gets scarce, merges from being a collection of individual cells to a collective entity moving across the forest floor. This was to show an example of quantum phase locking which "could provide a bridge joining classical, nonlinear reality with linear, quantum reality" (P. 188). Great Two Thousand year Philosophy.
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Title: Seven Life Lessons of Chaos : Spiritual Wisdom from the Science of Change by John Briggs, F David Peat ISBN: 006093073X Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 March, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick ISBN: 0140092501 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: December, 1988 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Synchronicity : The Bridge Between Matter and Mind by David Peat ISBN: 0553346768 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 May, 1987 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Fractal Geometry of Nature by Benoit B. Mandelbrot ISBN: 0716711869 Publisher: W H Freeman & Co. Pub. Date: September, 1982 List Price(USD): $42.50 |
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Title: The Essence of Chaos (The Jessie and John Danz Lecture Series) by Edward N. Lorenz ISBN: 0295975148 Publisher: University of Washington Press Pub. Date: April, 1996 List Price(USD): $13.37 |
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