Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order (Penguin Press Science) by Steven Strogatz (PDF)

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SYNC’ IS A STORY OF A DAZZLING KIND OF ORDER IN THE UNIVERSE, THE HARMONY THAT COMES FROM CYCLES IN SYNC. THE TENDENCY TO SYCHRONIZE IS ONE OF THE MOST FAR- REACHING DRIVES IN ALL OF NATURE. IT EXTENDS FROM PEOPLE TO PLANETS, FROM ANIMALS TO ATOMS. IN ‘SYNC’ PROFESSOR STEVEN STROGATZ CONSIDERS A RANGE OF APPLICATIONS – HUMAN SLEEP AND CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS, MENSTRUAL SYNCHRONY, INSECT OUTBREAKS, SUPERCONDUCTORS, LASERS, SECRET CODES, HEART ARRHYTHMIAS AND FADS – CONNECTING ALL TRHOUGH AN EXPLORATION OF THE SAME MATHEMATICAL THEME: SELF- ORGANISATION, OR THE SPONTANEOUS EMERGENCE OF ORDER OUT OF CHAOS. FOCUSED ENOUGH TO PRESENT A COHERENT WORLD UNTO THEMSELVES, STROGATZ’S CHOSEN TOPICS TOUCH ON SEVERAL OF THE HOTTEST DIRECTIONS IN CONTEMPORARY SCIENCE.

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⭐As humans, we are a product of spontaneous order, specifically of a version of spontaneous order that we call evolution. With no plan and no planner, innovations (genetic mutations) occur randomly, are tested in the marketplace of survival, and the most successful go forward. The outcome has been beneficial for the entire species.Spontaneous order is a concept with a long history in economics and sociology. Steven Horwitz has traced the spontaneous order tradition from Adam Smith to Carl Menger to Hayek. It is F. A. Hayek who is viewed as the primary champion of the idea that the spontaneous collaboration of free people “creates things which are greater than their individual minds can ever fully comprehend.” Allowing spontaneous orders to flourish is the essence of a free society.Why, then, is spontaneous order repressed in modern societies and economies? Why do we insist upon, and seem to prefer, hierarchies, authority, designed institutions and planned economies?Our human brains do not seem to be able to understand or conceive of a system of emergent order for the social organization of the species. We insist on a linear vision of cause and effect, on hubristic processes of design, and on rigid authoritarian and hierarchical social structures.If, instead, we could recognize the beneficial outcomes of spontaneous order and embrace a future characterized by conditions that favor spontaneous order, we’d all live better and more fulfilled lives.Steven Strogatz can help to open our minds to this possibility with a book called Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In The Universe, Nature and Daily Life. Dr. Strogatz is a Professor of Applied Mathematics who has focused on a science of Synchrony, Sync for short.He starts the reader of his book on a journey of explanation with a seemingly simple example. Fireflies are known flash in synchrony, each flashing on and off at the same time. How do they orchestrate themselves? At this point he introduces us to an important concept: coupled oscillators.These are pairs of biological phenomena that can influence each other. If one firefly fires early, it can influence its coupled oscillator neighbor to speed up. If one fires late, it can influence its coupled oscillator to slow down. Eventually, each pair gets in sync and an entire neighborhood of fireflies can become synchronized. How do they do it? Dr. Strogatz reveals the big idea: they self-organize.He then gives us additional examples of coupled oscillators synchronizing, including crickets chirping, the firing of pacemaker cells in the human heart, and stock market booms and crashes. The richness of the world is due, in large part, he says, to the miracle of self-organization.But he observes, “Unfortunately, our minds are bad at grasping these kinds of problems. We’re accustomed to thinking in terms of centralized control, clear chains of command, and the straightforward logic of cause and effect. But in huge, interconnected systems, where every player ultimately affects every other, our standard ways of thinking fall apart.”In fact, he has given us our first clue to the acceptance of spontaneous order. We can think of individuals in unhampered economic markets engaging in mutually voluntary exchange as coupled oscillators. Buyers and sellers. Producers and consumers. Each aligns with the other through market feedback (when the producer observes what the consumer does and does not buy) and the pricing mechanism (when the producer discovers what value the consumer assigns to different choices available to them). These coupled oscillators can achieve sync if there are no restrictions on their mutual communication.Another chapter is entitled “The Sympathetic Universe”. Dr. Strogatz tells the story of the seventeenth century Dutch physicist Christian Huygens, who observed two pendulum clocks hanging close to each other in his room whose pendulum swings started out unsynchronized but, over time, synchronized themselves. He attributed the phenomenon to “a kind of sympathy” between them. In fact, Strogatz demonstrates that the effect springs from the laws of mathematics and physics.Yet the word “sympathy” resonates, because Adam Smith told us (in Theory Of Moral Sentiments) that sympathy is the basis for the synchronized working of markets and societies.We are each endowed with a natural sympathy towards others. When we see others distressed or happy, we feel for them. In markets, this sympathy results in entrepreneurs developing new offerings designed to alleviate others’ dissatisfactions and improve their lives. The feedback loop from customer to entrepreneur, indicating whether the new offering is accepted and valuable, is sympathy operating in the reverse direction. The entrepreneur and the customer are coupled oscillators synchronizing via sympathetic connection.In the final section of Sync, Dr. Strogatz tells us about “small-world networks.” In studying the networks in which oscillators are connected, scientists have identified some conditions under which sync and the rapid, sometimes explosive, spread of information and ideas are most likely to emerge. The pattern of connections between individuals – “the architecture of relationships” – is what matters.Structure always affects function. The structure of social networks, for example, affects the spread of information. The “small-world” structure refers to a complex network which includes a tight knit set of “local connections” (think family, friends, neighborhood, work colleagues) and a widely flung set of global connections (think people all over the world whom we correspond with on e-mail, our LinkedIn network of connections, globally distributed connections in a professional association, and so on).The internet is one simple example of a small-world network. Most web pages link to others on the same topic, but occasionally may veer off onto idiosyncratic byways. To use the example of infectious diseases, “Ebola demonstrated that infectious diseases spread mainly within tight-knit communities, but also hitch rides on airplanes.”.Simple general rules determine how sync emerges in vast networked populations. In a separate TED talk, Strogatz explained the general rules for a flock of starlings or a school of fish to move in incredibly beautiful synchronized motions.“There are just three simple rules. First, all the individuals are only aware of their nearest neighbors. Second, all the individuals have a tendency to line up. And third, they’re all attracted to each other, but they try to keep a small distance apart. And when you build those three rules in, automatically you start to see swarms that look very much like fish schools or bird flocks. Now, fish like to stay close together, about a body length apart. Birds try to stay about three or four body lengths apart. But except for that difference, the rules are the same for both.”This brings us neatly back to F.A. Hayek and his sociology of spontaneous order. He proposed that all individuals be free to act and to innovate in a system of general rules that apply to all, and do not favor one individual or group over another, or favor a predetermined outcome. They connect with each other through knowledge and information sharing, and provide feedback to each other through the price system.Today, individuals can share and express their sympathy for each other both locally and globally, in what Dr. Strogatz would call a small-world network. And, as Brittany Hunter has pointed out at the Center For Individualism, if we look, we find spontaneous order all around us.Conditions are ideal for sync and spontaneous order – if we let it emerge.

⭐Imagine that you spend a vacation in Thailand and you see several thousands of fireflies along a river bank, where each of them flashes periodically. Before long, you will observe that they flash in union and periodically for a long time. It is known that when some proper conditions are satisfied, females who live together have a tendency to menstruate at the same time. If you hang two pendulums from hooks embedded in the same wooden beam and separate them not too long, then you will see that they move in sympathy: they swung precisely opposite to each other. When one sounded tick, the other would sound tock. We see here a spontaneous order.”The laws of thermodynamics seem to dictate the opposite that nature should inexorably degenerate toward a state of greater disorder (p1)”. But as we have seen, “nature has somehow managed to assemble themselves (p1)”.In the above examples, the individuals oscillate in time. Two or more oscillators are said to be coupled if some physical or chemical process allows them to influence one another (p3). Using this language, we can say that the coupled oscillators synchronized themselves.In this book, Steven Strogatz asks the following questions: How exactly do coupled oscillators synchronize themselves, and under what conditions? When is sync impossible and when is it inevitable? (p3)1950s – Norbert Wiener was interested in the alpha rhythm of brain waves, 10 cycles a second. He argued that the frequency (10 cycles a second) comes from millions of brain cells of diverse frequency. The distribution of the diverse frequencies will be the bell shape that is highest at 10 (the normal distribution curve) if there is no coupling. But by some coupling, only the frequency 10 is distinguished. And he suggested a concrete frequency distribution (peak at 10) with the coupling.Since there was no accurate equipment to prove his prediction, the confirmation had to be left to later researchers. And he guessed that such coupling would be quite universal. For example, he thought that synchronized croaking frogs and flashing fireflies are such phenomena.1960s – Art Winfree considered groups of different kinds of things instead of identical things of different frequencies. If the population in the group is extremely diverse (inhomogeneous), then sync will not happen. If the populations are clones, then sync happens. They are obvious facts. We can expect that the amount of sync will increase as the homogeneity of the populations increases. What Winfree found was that there is a critical point such that the amount of sync never happens until the homogeneity of population increases to the point, and that the amount of sync surges abruptly after that point. It’s like that at 0 degree, ice melt into water.1970s – Winfree obtained his results by simulation. If mathematicians try to treat the above fundamental problems, they will think about some models that are abstraction of real things in nature. (For mathematicians, what else is possible?) Japanese physicist Yoshiki Kuramoto constructed a simpler, mathematical model, and he mathematically proved (but with some gaps) what Winfree did. Winfree and Kuramoto’s works partially vindicated Wiener’s claim in the sense that the sync happens under the condition that the oscillators are sufficiently homogeneous.1980s – If we consider groups of different kinds of things instead of being interested in the same kind of individual things as Winfree did, then we can ask about the stability of the state of the groups. If the state of the groups is, say X, and if we perturb the groups a little bit, then would the state remain the same X? If so, the state is called stable, if not, called unstable.Steven Strogatz solved a long standing problem about stability of sync at some point of homogeneity of populations near the critical point. His answer is that it is neutrally stable (jargon).The book was more academic and difficult than I thought. I think that the book is difficult than Chaos by Gleick. For some chapters, if you are not familiar with the Gleick’s book, you may have difficulty to read the chapters. And the language can be an obstacle to read. I am not a native English speaker and not so familiar with English other than my area. Retina, circadian, marvel, sympathy, speck, in union, etc, if you need to look up these words in a dictionary, then the book will be hard for you as it was to me.The most appropriate readers for the books seem to be serious college students who study science and hope to be a researcher in this area, dynamical systems. If you are not so much eager to learn about dynamical systems, then the book can be boring because it deals with too many areas like biological clock (biology), superconductivity (physics), cryptography (information theory), BZ reaction (chemistry), etc even before the first two thirds of the book. I stopped reading from there. The author is known for a very skillful writer and I totally agree to that. But its coverage is too diverse.The author majored in mathematics in college and studied biological mathematics in graduate school. One of the good points for me was that I realized that biological mathematics can be my interest (I am a pure mathematician who is interested in physics). When I read at an article that these days the famous geometer Mikhail Gromov studies biological mathematics, I wondered why he studies such things of different nature with geometry. Now I can understand.The book quotes a phrase from the book ‘The Geometry of Biological Time’ by A. Winfree: “From cell division to heartbeat, clocklike rhythms pervade the activities of every living organism. The cycles of life are ultimately biochemical in mechanism but many of the principles that dominate their orchestration are essentially mathematical.”Strogatz says that “The players are different, but their abstract patterns of interaction are the same (p65).”, or “The sympathy of clocks taught us that the capacity for sync does not depend on intelligence, or life, or natural selection. It springs from the deepest source of all: the laws of mathematics and physics (p108).”Many physicists believe that there are mathematical principles that govern the universe. Similarly, I learned that there can be mathematical principles that govern the universe especially for the living beings.There are many interesting scientific researches in the book. One of them is the experiments on the sleep cycle of human beings. It claims that there are forbidden zones in the sleep cycle such that at the period people can never sleep deeply. But I don’t agree to the result. From my own experience, I know that I can sleep well at any time if I was awake more than 24 hours and I had peace in my mind then.

⭐The subject of the book is synchrony that is coupled phenomena which occur simultaneously. Synchrony is all permeating in nature and is encountered in both living and non living matter while the underlying entity that unifies all these disparate phenomena is mathematics. More analytically the book is a study of ‘coupled oscillators’ – entities that cycle automatically, that repeat themselves over and over again at regular intervals. Fireflies flash; planets orbit; pacemaker cells fire. Two or more are said to be coupled if some physical or chemical process allows them to influence one another. Fireflies communicate with light. Planets tug one another with gravity. Heart cells pass electrical current back and fourth. Nature uses every available channel to allow its oscillators to communicate with each other. The results of these communications is often synchrony, in which all oscillators begin to move as one that is occur simultaneously.But apart from the synchrony appearing in nature, we have synchrony with the invention of the marvelous oscillators of the twentieth century: electrical generators and phase-locked loops, lasers and transistors and superconducting Josephson junctions.The underlying unifying entity of the preceding disparate phenomena – naturally occurring or invented – is the intractability of non-linear mathematics. But the reader should not panic. The author does not use even a suspicion of Mathematics but instead illustrates the key ideas relying on metaphors and images from everyday life.The author concludes the book with a speculative but profound insight. He points that even mainstream scientists begin to acknowledge that reduction-ism may not be powerful enough to solve all the great mysteries we are facing: cancer, consciousness, the origin of life, AIDS, global warming, the functioning of the cell, the ebb and flow of the economy. And believes that nonlinear dynamics is central to the future of science. As one of the oldest and most elementary parts on nonlinear science (dealing, as it does with purely rhythmic units), synchrony has offered penetrating insights into everything from cardiac arrhythmias to superconductivity, from sleep cycles to the stability of the power grid. It is grounded in rigorous mathematical ideas; passed the test of experiment; and it describes and unifies a remarkably wide range of cooperative behavior in living and nonliving matter, at every scale of length from subatomic to the cosmic. Aside from its importance and intrinsic fascination, the author believes that synchrony also provides a crucial first step for what is coming next in the study of complex nonlinear systems, where the oscillators are eventually to be replaced by genes and cells, companies and people.I found it amazing that a book that is already ten years old would ring so remarkably modern.As my own epilogue may I add that only weeks ago I listened here in the university of Cyprus a compellingly fascinating lecture by professor Focas who is also the chair of the recently established line in nonlinear Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.

⭐For the most part though,it reminded me of James Gleicks’ Chaos book in the way that the Sync story is conveyed with tales of maverick characters on the fringes of established science, making serendipitous discoveries that lay around waiting for someone to slot them into a framework.Within this there are numerous enlightening insights and quirky facts about the rhythm and harmonies that universally pervade the fabric of existence,which make it well worth the effort. Although I did enjoy this book,I didn’t find it as thrilling and inspiring as some other people seemed to do.It does roll along pretty well until it hits part 3,where the ability of language and metaphor to convey non linear concepts of encryption and 3D sync left me needy in some respects.Although I was able to follow the general principles,it was still frustrating not to be able to fully comprehend some of the finer points involved. Overall an entertaining popular science book,with a few moments of conceptual difficulties for non mathematicians,which can be circumvented without any deleterious effects to the whole.

⭐This is a fantastic book packed with insights and wonderful ideas. Its subject is the power of synchronisation, or as the book’s subtitle puts it, `the emergence of spontaneous order’.Our approaches to managing pretty much anything, including organisations is based on increasingly complex structures of processes and control, yet this focus on plans, objectives and goals appears to be absent elsewhere in the universe.The book provides a history of the growing realisation that self-organisation is a powerful and inspiring force that can be found throughout almost all natural processes, from those of sub-atomic particles, through to those that span the universe.Entwined beautifully with the history and progress of this area of science, Steven interleaves his personal experiences in the field which not only illuminate the bigger picture but also injects the sense of adventure and joy of discovery involved in the pursuit of new ideas. In doing so it provides insights into how mathematics, simulation and imagination can be entwined to explore new ideas. The result gives a real sense of fun to be had.Skilfully Steve paints the picture of fascinating ideas whose core is fundamentally mathematical, without recourse to equations. Indeed the imagery he uses to create clear understanding is very impressive.The book covers a lot of ground from the behaviour of massed fireflies, electronic circuits, the functioning of our hearts. All these sources of synchronicity are explained beautifully and lead to numerous insights that will be of great value for anyone seeking an alternative to the current focus on increasing use of control as the basis for managing our people, organisations and society.The epilogue to the book points to a new dawn for science with an end to reductionist thinking.Highly recommended.

⭐Strogatz seems well qualified and certainly has plenty of subject matter. The book follows a logical (chronological) order. Analogy is employed to explain concepts in preference to using equations (non-linear variety), I got the impression this was a wise choice. In general, Strogatz suceeds in greatly complexity of this cutting edge subject, without over simplification.Some (minor) criticisms: Print would be a little small for some readers. A graph of the “strange attractor” would have helped clarity at one point. I would have appreciated any comment on the ‘sync’ of spiral galaxy arms (which order themselves into density waves.)Overall, this book is well pitched with no obvious spurious claims – sometimes tempting if a science is in its early stages. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on sleep experiments and highly recomend this to anyone who has been subjected to rapidly varying night/day shifts.

⭐I have no criticism of the topics in the book itself. They are interesting but the material is not always easy to follow (for me anyway!) and I found myself skimming the chapters. Nevertheless I do intend to go back for a second reading which I think will help me understand something in which I have a definite interest with the book having the potential to advance that interest.

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