Book description
'Gribbin takes us through the basics with his customary talent for
accessibility and clarity' Sunday Times
The world around us can be a complex, confusing place. Earthquakes
happen without warning, stock markets fluctuate, weather forecasters
seldom seem to get it right - even other people continue to baffle us.
How do we make sense of it all?
In fact, John Gribbin reveals, our seemingly random universe is
actually built on simple laws of cause and effect that can explain
why, for example, just one vehicle braking can cause a traffic jam;
why wild storms result from a slight atmospheric change; even how we
evolved from the most basic materials. Like a zen painting, a fractal
image or the pattern on a butterfly's wings, simple elements form the
bedrock of a sophisticated whole.
Synthesizing chaos and complexity theory for the perplexed, Deep
Simplicity brilliantly illuminates the harmony underlying our existence.
John Gribbin is one of today's greatest writers of popular science
and the author of bestselling books, including
In Search of Schr
dinger's Cat
,
Stardust
,
Science: A History
and
Deep Simplicity
. He is famous to his many fans for making complex ideas simple, and
says that his aim in his writing - much of it done with his wife, Mary
Gribbin - is to share with his readers his sense of wonder at the
strangeness of the universe. John Gribbin trained as an astrophysicist
at Cambridge University and is currently Visiting Fellow in Astronomy at
the University of Sussex.
