From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Fri Mar 07 2003 - 11:25:11 PST
----- Original Message -----
From: cunews_at_cornell.edu
Sent: Friday, March 07, 2003 2:06 PM
To: CUNEWS-PHYSICAL_SCIENCE-L_at_cornell.edu; CUNEWS-SCIENCE-L_at_cornell.edu
Subject: Cornell News: Steven Strogatz writes book on sychrony
In his book "Sync", Cornell's Steven Strogatz writes compelling
history of a scientific revolution long in the making
FOR RELEASE: March 7, 2003
Contact: David Brand
Office: 607-255-3651
E-mail: deb27_at_cornell.edu
Cornell University mathematician Steven Strogatz views the human mind
as tending to see order as the work of intelligence. The poet Robert
Frost, upon encountering the eerie tableau of a white spider on a
white flower devouring a white moth, imagined that a sinister hand
had arranged them.
Perhaps, says Strogatz, this is why scientists -- always on guard
against the seduction of a mystical explanation -- have sometimes
neglected to find order in the universe, even where it is powerfully
present.
He presents two examples:
o In 1917, a letter to the journal Science described the phenomenon
of fireflies apparently blinking on and off together in unison, but
the writer dismissed it as the "twitching" of his eyelids.
o In the 1950s, biochemist Boris Belousov created a strange fluid
that pulsated with regular color changes, oscillating from yellow to
clear and back again like a liquid metronome. Belousov's colleagues
believed he was delusional, and no journal would publish his
discovery.
But science, which has long considered order and synchrony the
exception rather than the rule in a chaotic universe, is beginning to
come around. In his new book, Sync: The Emerging Science of
Spontaneous Order (Hyperion, 2003), Strogatz, who is professor of
applied mathematics at Cornell, describes the new science that is
making sense of the synchronal flashing of fireflies and Belousov's
discovery of the oscillating chemical reaction.
Synchrony, says Strogatz, shows up in the most unlikely of places:
from satellite orbits to whizzing electrons, from the chirping of
crickets to the tendency (once dismissed by science as urban
folklore) of women who live in close quarters or who spend a lot of
time together to menstruate around the same time of the month.
Order is all around us, and scientists in diverse disciplines are
constantly uncovering new examples of it. But Strogatz and his
colleagues make a far more extraordinary claim: Order is not
just possible, it is inevitable. In 1989 Strogatz, along with Boston
College mathematician Rennie Mirollo, proved mathematically that any
system of "coupled oscillators" -- that is, entities capable of
responding to each other's signals, be they crickets, electrons or
celestial bodies -- will spontaneously self-organize.
Sync is a lay person's handbook to the difficult science of
synchrony, using everyday metaphors to capture the flavor of arcane
mathematical proofs and scientific arguments. But it is also a
compelling history of a scientific revolution long in the making.
The heroes of the revolution span centuries and continents. They are
a motley crew, hailing from physics, genetics, psychology, chemistry,
entomology, engineering, computer science and mathematics. Many, like
Strogatz's mentor, University of Arizona mathematical biologist Art
Winfree, operated at the fringes of their disciplines; others, like
the brilliant and notoriously peculiar mathematician Paul Erdös,
are at the fringes of society. Often they have worked in isolation
from one another, unaware that independently they were laying the
foundation for a science that only now is beginning to emerge as a
discipline in its own right.
Strogatz gives a frank and often personal account of the uncertain,
thrilling first steps of a new science -- sometimes erupting in
unexpected discovery, sometimes toiling in seemingly endless
frustration. The magazine New Scientist hails Strogatz as "a gifted
and inspired communicator whose book, Sync, offers a real sense of
what it's like to be at the beginning of Something Big." And the
April issue of Popular Science calls Sync "the most exciting new book
of the spring."
Faced with mysterious and unexpected harmonies, the natural human
response is awe and wonder -- the kind of wonder, Strogatz says, that
is the inspiration and the reward for practicing science. He writes,
"The spectacle of sync strikes a chord in us, somewhere deep in our
souls. It's a wonderful and terrifying thing."
Strogatz also is the author of a textbook on nonlinear dynamics and
chaos. He has published numerous articles in scientific journals,
magazines and newspapers, including a March 4 op-ed page tribute to
physicist Enrico Fermi in The New York Times. In the article he
relates how in 1953 Fermi and his colleagues invented the concept of
the "computer experiment." Fermi loved the result, referring to it
affectionately as a "little discovery," wrote Strogatz. "He had never
guessed that nonlinear systems could harbor such a penchant for
order."
In New York City on Tuesday, March 25, Strogatz will hold a public
conversation about Sync with actor Alan Alda at 8:15pm in
Buttenweiser Hall, the 92nd St. Y.
This review was prepared by Lissa Harris, a Cornell graduate student
and Cornell News Service science-writing intern.
-30-
The web version of this release may be found at
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/March03/SYNC.Strogatz.lh.deb.html
Cornell University News Service
Surge 3
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
607-255-4206
cunews_at_cornell.edu
http://www.news.cornell.edu
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