MARK BUCHANAN is a science writer who has worked on the editorial staff of Nature and as a features editor for New Scientist. He earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Virginia. He is also the author of Nexus, The Social Atom and Forecast.
“Buchanan succeeds where others fail. . . . [He] is able to
communicate this novel way of thinking without compromising
scientific integrity.”—New Scientist
“I grabbed this book and turned the pages. Does Buchanan get it
right? Does he really understand how this might change the way we
look at the world? He does. This is the book I wish I had
written.”
—Per Bak, author of How Nature Works
“Ubiquity explains better than any previous book why many fields of
the natural world and human life are unpredictable.”
—Financial Times (London)
“There are many subtleties and twists in the story to which we
shall come later in this book, but the basic message, roughly
speaking, is simple: The peculiar and exceptionally unstable
organization of the critical state does indeed seem to be
ubiquitous in our world. Researchers in the past few years have
found its mathematical fingerprints in the workings of all the
upheavals I’ve mentioned so far, as well as in the spreading of
epidemics, the flaring of traffic jams, the patterns by which
instructions trickle down from managers to workers in an office,
and in many other things. At the heart of our story, then, lies the
discovery that networks of things of all kinds—atoms, molecules,
species, people, and even ideas—have a marked tendency to organize
themselves along similar lines. On the basis of this insight,
scientists are finally beginning to fathom what lies behind
tumultuous events of all sorts, and to see patterns at work where
they have never seen them before.”
—from the Introduction
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