» Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness

Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: One of the few books that may change your life
Comment: This book is hard to find, contains a bit too much math (you can kind-of skip it if it overwelms you), it is out of print, hard to find and exagerates a bit some times but, if you read through it your perspective on life, causality and human behaviour will change and you will have a better understanding of un-undestandable things.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A readable description of the theory of order out of chaos.
Comment: Here is an easy to read exposition of the theory of order out of chaos and how the natural world arises from basic natural processes repeated over and over again. The relevance of fractals to this study is given as well as a description of psychic processes. A must read for anyone interested in the new science. All the more complex theories of interest to the magical endeavor are based on the ideas presented in this book. It's an excellent companion to James Gleick's "Chaos."

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A Book Ahead of its Time - still
Comment: A wonderful synthesis of science at the edge. A grasp of how scientific methodology is changing to accommodate the revelations of chaos theory. The used edition I read was from 1990 and is prescient even now (alas). The informed and illuminating evidence that revolutionizes the current Neo-Darwinistic paradigm of molecular evolutionary theory towards the end of the book was particularly refreshing. John Briggs and F. Peat's thinking is so strikingly lucid, informed, and visionary that this book will fail to make almost any lecture list where it is most needed for years to come.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: A step deeper guild of Chaos Theory to layman
Comment: I've finished this book's Chinese version today. In the last year, I'm trying my best effort to absorb knowledge of Chaos Theory, Complexity, and Catastrophe Theory. It's quite hard to get a in-depth guild of the above knowledge to common people in Hong Kong.

My purpose to get the above knowledge is just in order to find the hidden order of financial market, and, of course, to make profit from the market. That's why I find this book is good to serve my purpose. It explained clearly on fractals, the relationship between chaos and order, and non-linearness.

I knew E. Peters has using fratals / Elloit Wave Theory to analyze financial market. Of course, it needs more intra-day data to try to find such fratals in a small scale period, e.g. in a 5-minute charts. But I guess that, such fractal are existing in the market, if you watching index movement everyday.

On another aspest, the technique of plotting data in a phase space is a tool to get the picture of financial market to me. This tools can be compared with weighted moving average, MACD, or other technical indicators. Though, phase space analysis is quite uneasy to a man without advanced mathematics. I'm quite sure such mathematical technique may apply to financial trading.

Besides, the idea of "quasi-periodic" is likely describing financial market. Though I got less knowledge from the book on this topic. It sounds like some ideas from William Gann, and other cyclist writings.

Hince, I'm benefitted from the book to enlighten new view point to see the world, and the market. I recommend any financial market practitioner to read this Chaos Theory guild and then reread some technical analysis classics, and reviewing their trading strategies. I believe that shall be worthy in one's trading life.

N.B. The picture 2.7 is missing (P.76), and there is some printing errors in its Chinese version which printed in 20.6.1997

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Science or Science Fiction
Comment: While this book does make some interesting points about chaos, I found that the book's blatant disregard for accepted science very hard to stomach. I currently attend Harvey Mudd College, a small, but highly regarded science and engineering school, so I like to think that I know something about the subject.

For example, at one point the authors are describing solitons (a term I had never heard before), states a theory that by generating an extra bit of energy we could put the universe out of the unstable equilibrium it currently exists in and cause it to "begin to boil." While this is all well and good, it makes vast assumptions that the authors neglect to mention. Most importantly it assumes that the universe is in an unstable equilibrium, a fact which although highly unlikely is not impossible. Secondly it assumes that the universe is completely clean of these bits of extra energy currently. They draw this parallel to an example of superheating water because without external particles to build upon no bubbles can form to release the steam. This is also true, but it is still impossible because it is impossible to have a perfect system like this. There are always going to be minute cracks in the pot, or imperfections in the water (fractal theory, covered earlier in the book, even states this!), and so while this might be theoretically possible it will not happen in any real world environment. The book has many other places like this where the authors conveniently leave out details that might weaken their arguments. I find this to make the book as a whole very frustrating to read, even if some of their points are valid.

Another reason that I find the book to be very frustrating is that everything is very sensationalized. At the beginning of the description of fractals the authors say that the first person to think of a fractal curve created "a panic among mathematicians that took some fifty years to resolve." I find it truly hard to believe that the entire mathematical community was pulling their collective hair for fifty years trying to explain this curve, but by phrasing it this way the authors make it seem like science as a whole does not want to accept new ideas because it would make them look bad. In reality though I think the scientific community is ready to accept anything that can be strongly proven theoretically, or experimentally (just look at relativity, or quantum).

Because of all of these failings I would not recommend this book. I am sure that there are many other better books about chaos theory that do an excellent job of describing it without disregarding the rest of science, or trying to place it in places where it does not necessarily belong.

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