Overview

This text explains how nature's patterns - the markings on animals, windblown ripples of sand, the forms of water in motion - are woven by self-organization, through simple, local interactions between their component parts. The products of self-organization are universal patterns: spirals, spots and stripes, branches and honeycombs.

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9780198502449

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The latest addition to the growing body of popular literature about the scientific study of complexity explains why similar patterns recur in widely different contexts in nature - why, for example, the stripes on the skin of a tropical fish resemble the pattern of ripples on the windblown sandy surface of the desert. The most intriguing features of the natural world, including life itself, seem to exist in a state bordering on chaos, where patterns are created by the flow of energy through a system, whether an ecosystem or the rippling sand. This is one of the clearest accounts so far of a new branch of science in the making. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Philip Ball, an editor at Nature since 1988, has written many scientific articles on all topics for the popular press. His first book, Designing the Molecular World, won the American Association of Publishers award for books on chemistry.

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