Why am I passionate about this?
I can’t explain my lifelong fascination with the strange dance between culture, power, and technology. Maybe it’s because I grew up as a math whiz with a deep love of music or because I read too much sci-fi under my blanket by flashlight when I should have been getting my beauty sleep. I was lucky to become friends with Jesse Gilbert at the age of 14 - we goaded each other into spending our lives researching, writing about, and playing with tech in a cultural context. We wrote this book together as a way to bring our decades-long dialogue into the public eye and invite a wider range of people to participate in the conversation.
Aram's book list on books about data that will blow your mind
Why did Aram love this book?
My friend Jesse Gilbert handed me his copy of Chaos in 1992 or 1993, shortly after he read it for a college class. “You have to read this book,” he insisted. “I need to talk about it with you.”
Chaos theory, which is the subject of Gleick’s nonfiction book, has become such a dominant trope in global fiction, the popular imagination, and meme culture that younger folks probably don’t realize how completely new this way of thinking was for most of us when the book was first published in 1987.
In the 1980s, science fiction and popular tech narratives were all about robots and spaceships, with a heavy dose of late-Cold War nuclear anxiety. Then Gleick published Chaos. Suddenly, it seemed like everyone was interested in fractals, parallel universes, and virtual worlds. The concepts of bounded infinities and multi-dimensional topographies opened up not just new types of narratives but…
3 authors picked Chaos as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Uncover one of the most exciting frontiers of modern physics in this fascinating, insightful and accessible overview of Chaos theory.
'An exceedingly readable introduction to a new intellectual world' Observer
From the turbulence of the weather to the complicated rythmns of the human heart, 'chaos' is at the centre of our day to day lives. Cutting across several scientific disciplines, James Gleick explores and elucidates the science of the unpredicatable with an immensely readable narrative style and flair.
'An awe-inspiring book. Reading Chaos gave me the sensation that someone had just found the light-switch' Douglas Adams