Modern science, the Internet, big data, and AI are each saying the same thing to us: the world is -- and always has been -- far more complex and unpredictable than we've allowed ourselves to see. As a result we're undergoing a sea change in our understanding of how things happen, and in our deepest strategies for predicting, preparing for, and managing our lives and our businesses. For example, machine learning allows us to make better predictions (think the weather, stock performance, online clicks) but we know less about why those predictions are right--and we need to get used to that. And in fact, over the past twenty years we've been unintentionally developing strategies that avoid anticipating what will happen so we don't have to depend on unreliable revenue forecasts, assumptions about customer needs, and hypotheses about how a product will be used. By embracing these strategies, we're flourishing by creating yet more possibilities and yet more unpredictability. In wide-ranging stories and characteristically all-encompassing syntheses, technology researcher, internet expert, and philosopher David Weinberger reveals the trends that hide in so many aspects of our lives--and shows us how they matter.--

In this book, after discussing the fundamental problems of current science and other philosophic concepts, beginning with controversies between Heraclitus and Parmenides, Ilya Prigogine launches into a message of great hope: the future has not been determined. Contrary to globalisation and the apparent contemporary mass culture society, individual behaviour is beginning to increasingly become the key factor which governs the evolution of both the world and society as a whole. It is a message that challenges existing widespread views, implicitly or explicitly, through mass communication, moreover the importance of the individual's actions implies a reflection of each person on the responsibilities that each one assumes when taking or acting upon a decision. This responsibility is associated with the freedom of thought as well as a critical analysis of fashions, customs, preconceived ideas, and ideologies, externally imposed: exactly contrary to the ideas of those who wish us to be "perfect consumers" in a world dominated only by monetary wealth. Challenging this drive towards the elimination of freedom of though in the individual is now imperative if we are to save man and his planet from catastrophe which seems to be ever imminent and (unfortunately) irreversible. This last book of Ilya Prigogine provides a small, disputable, but nonetheless valuable contribution towards that end.

The discipline of nonlinear dynamics has developed explosively in all areas of physics over the last two decades. This comprehensive primer summarizes the main developments in the mathematical theory of dynamical systems, chaos, pattern formation and complexity. An introduction to mathematical concepts and techniques is given in the first part of the book, before being applied to stellar, interstellar, galactic and large scale complex phenomena in the Universe. Oded Regev demonstrates the possible application of ideas including strange attractors, Poincaré sections, fractals, bifurcations, and complex spatial patterns, to specific astrophysical problems.

On August 2000 in the Lomonosov Moscow State University the first scientific conference dedicated to chaos in the real astronomical systems was held. The most prominent astrophysisists - specialist in the field of stochastic dynamics - attended the conference. A broad scope of the problems related to the observed manifes tations of chaotic motions in galactic and stellar objects, with the involvement of basic theory and numerical modeling, were addressed. The idea (not so obvious, as we believe, to many astrophysicists) was to show that, while great progress in the field of stochastic mechanics was accomplished, the science of chaos in actually observed systems is only just being born. Basically, the situation described prompted the organizers to hold the meeting in order to discuss chaotic processes in real systems. It seemed worthwhile to begin these introductory remarks with a brief descrip tion of some events that preceeded the conference. Since actually existing systems are the subject of the natural sciences, and in the latter experiments play the key role, we shall begin our account with the experimental results.