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Title: When Time Breaks Down: The Three-Dimensional Dynamics of Electrochemical Waves and Cardiac Arrhythmias by Arthur T. Winfree ISBN: 0-691-02402-2 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 01 April, 1987 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: Aging Well
Comment: The title is unfortunate: it gives the impression of a crank book or an overly romanticized "popular science" report. Actually this is a fairly serious scholarly monograph, standing out from the crowd only by being quite readable and nicely illustrated. But it is pretty old book. Maybe it was "ahead of its time" in 1987, but what is its value today, when Science Citations Index says it is mentioned only a couple times a month in new scientific papers. Why would anyone buy it now, years after it went out of print? One reason: It gives the clearest presentation I know of the modern alternative to the then dominant theoretical context regarding "vulnerability" of the heart beat to lethal upset by a single unfortunately-timed stimulus. The conventional view was then (and so remains still in medical textbooks) that a variety of complex mechanisms lead a propagating activation front to circulate through the heart muscle and return to parts previously activated about as soon as those parts have recovered their readiness to activate again. This book does not contradict, but provides an alternative perspective from the viewpoint of abstract topology (all done in pictures without explicit mathematics.) The merit of doing so seems to be that things looks simpler and so some far-reaching predictions could be made about how these lethal arrhythmias get started and how they can be terminated, predictions which seemed implausible in the conventional framework. Most of these were tested and confirmed a few years after publication. Accordingly, much of the theory has since matured from qualitative picture-oriented format to quantitative numerical format that promises improvements in electrical pacemakers and defibrillators. So this old book is still perhaps the most readable introduction to the basic ideas of this newer outlook, which is today maturing into a mathematically more complicated bidomain biophysics. Another thing nicely done in this picture book is the geometry, or, I should say, topology, of vortices in kinds of excitable media other than heart muscle ... mainly a simple chemical solution that has since become popular in high-school and college lab courses, and in numerical models based on equations of reaction and diffusion that one today finds illustrated at innumerable web sites. This book seems to be where much of it started. These vortices consist of something like smoke rings variously linked and knotted. At the time of this publication they were entirely figments of imagination, not yet examined for stability even in computer simulations. Today they are well established among applied mathematicians, and the causes of their stability are widely studied. None but the very simplest have yet been seen in the laboratory, though. Are there any major errors to avoid ingesting and assimilating if you look through this book? Some in the opening pages that describe circadian biological clocks (because some newly discovered features of their dynamics suggested the alternative approach to cardiology) make statements about exceptions to the usual in certain lower organisms, which exceptions have since gone away. On the other hand, it was then merely conjectured that humans would turn out to exhibit all the main features of such clockworks in other organisms, and this has since been borne out. It was suggested that the dynamics of ventricular fibrillation will be mostly figured out by the turn of the century, on the basis of some such concepts as presented here, and this seems roughly true now, but the story has become considerably more intricate. Page 221 reverses "left" left "right" twist geometry. Further nitpicking seems inappropriate in such long retrospect because the main ideas andd questions raised turned out to be fruitful. For a somewhat drier update on 15 years subsequent work in many cardiological and chemical laboratories and in supercomputers with nice graphics, look up the same author's current book here at Amazon.com. There might also be cause to supplement from his website, marley.biosci.arizona.edu/~art. Also search the web (which did not exist back then) under such keywords as "excitable media", "scroll waves", "spiral waves", "Belousov-Zhabotinsky", "fibrillation and singularities" and you will find ever more material including abundant movies.
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Title: Timing of Biological Clocks (Scientific American Library, No 19) by Arthur T. Winfree ISBN: 071675018X Publisher: Scientific American Library Pub. Date: December, 1987 List Price(USD): $32.95 |
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Title: Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order by Steven Strogatz ISBN: 0786868449 Publisher: Hyperion Press Pub. Date: 05 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Geometry of Biological Time by Arthur T. Winfree ISBN: 0387989927 Publisher: Springer Verlag Pub. Date: 08 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $89.95 |
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