Does God Play Dice? [antikvár]

Preface to the Second Edition The first edition of Does God Play Dice?, published in 1989, didn't have a preface. I was going through a period when 1 didn't write prefaces because I thought that nobody ever reads them, so it started with a prologue instead. The prologue remains, but now there's a preface to go with it - after all, two prologues would be overkill. If you already own the first edition and are wondering whether this one is different enough to be worth buying, you should either read this bit or thumb through Chapters 14— 17 where most of the new stuff lives. If not, just buy it now, OK? You can decide whether to read the preface when you get the book home. 'Chaos' is not just a trendy word for random. In the sense now prevalent in science, it is an entirely new and different concept. Chaos occurs when a deterministic (that is, non-random) system behaves in an apparently random manner. It may sound paradoxical, but 'apparently' hides many sins. The big discovery of the last decade is that chaos is just as common as traditional types of regular behaviour, such as steady states and periodic cycles. In retrospect, there's nothing very surprising about chaos. From today's viewpoint, and with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, it's very easy to understand how chaos arises and why it often occurs. Despite this lots of people, many of them scientists, still talk about chaos as if it is something weird and exotic. Sorry, but it isn't. Chaos is just as down-to-earth as periodic cycles. But over several centuries we've got used to periodic cycles, whereas we've only just stumbled upon the existence of chaos and we haven't got used to it yet. That's not a surprise either: chaos is much more subtle and intricate. Chaos has come a long way since 1989. It has transmuted, especially in the popular press, into something called 'chaos theory'. I think it's a mistake to view chaos as a theory in its own right, but I appreciate that journalists need a catchy phrase to sum up the area, and what else would you call it? So I sometimes use that phrase myself, though on the whole I use it to refer to the popular image of chaos, as distinct from that of practising scientists. However, chaos isn't a theory. It's a concept, and one that cannot sensibly be separated from the rest of dynamics. It's an idea that cuts across all of the traditional subject boundaries of science. It's a missing piece from a vast jigsaw puzzle. It's a far-reaching unification of order and disorder. But