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Rating: 
Summary: Irritating and pointless
Review: After reading the first three pages of the introduction, I thought "this must get better". I skipped to chapter 1 and read two more pages of vague, disconnected repetition. So I turned to Amazon reviews to see if it was worth my while to persist. It isn't. On to the next book...
Rating:
Summary: Irritating and pointless
Review: After reading the first three pages of the introduction, I thought "this must get better". I skipped to chapter 1 and read two more pages of vague, disconnected repetition. So I turned to Amazon reviews to see if it was worth my while to persist. It isn't. On to the next book...
Rating:
Summary: Muddled, inaccurate, overblown, and poorly written
Review: British journalist Mark Ward's exposition of the theory of Universality and self-organized criticality (SOC) is little more than breathless hype purporting to show that fractal patterns and SOC are present in virtually every aspect of the biological and physical world. While this may or may not be true, Ward's largely anecdotal presentation, with its at times almost-mystical (although nonreligious) tone, unfortunately arouses the suspicion that the theory rests on a shaky scientific foundation. It should also not be too much to expect that a book devoted to the theory of Universality actually give an explicit definition of Universality, which Ward consistently fails to do. The book is introductory and nontechnical, so it is perhaps unfair to expect him to give a solid theoretical foundation to the theory, but the reader is left with an uneasy feeling that the gentleman "doth protest too much." Those interested in chaos theory, emergent phenomona, and SOC would do much better to read the books of Stuart Kauffmann and John Holland or the older nontechnical classic "Chaos: Making a New Science" by James Gleick.The book is also plagued with numerous factual errors. (His reference to Beethoven's Eroica Symphony as a late work, produced in the same general period as the Ninth Symphony and the Diabelli Variations, has been cited in another review.) Additionally, Mr. Ward's writing style and his many lapses in grammar, syntax, and punctuation make the book irritating to read and make one wish that a good editor had taken the manuscript firmly in hand. Awkward shifts in tense within a single sentence, lack of subject-verb agreement, and Mr. Ward's apparent disdain for commas make what is actually a simple book a chore to read.
Rating:
Summary: Not beyond, still in the middle of it
Review: I read introductory books to be informed on a field I am not familiar with: so I expect clarity and relevance. Ward's book is far from that. The Preface, the Introduction and the first chapter are devoted to promise information about a new theory behind everything, but you never get there. Facts, names and theories are put together, but they don't seem to add up to nothing. Where I am able to check, the book in not correct (Beethoven's Eroica is not a late composition).
Really disappointing. Not a service to the theories it is meant to support and divulgate.
Somewhere, it should be said that this is just the American edition of an English book called "Universality".
Rating:
Summary: Long, empty, boring, not worth the time
Review: One would think that 300 pages discussing science theory would have some substance but this book could have been edited down to an eight page magazine article with little loss of content. And not a "heavy" magazine for scientists but a "popular" type magazine. I forced myself to stay with it hoping that the author would eventually get serious but the book stayed chatty and anecdotal to the end. According to the bio Mr. Ward is a science writer for the BBC and I did get the feeling of a TV narration purposely kept light in order not to scare off any viewers. I found myself rereading series of pages because I had the feeling that I had missed something and then finding that I hadn't missed a thing, there was simply no content to retain. This happened repeatedly and made this book a real chore to finish and ultimately unrewarding. A shame too because the premises Mr. Ward teases the reader with are intriguing but the book fails miserably to live up to the promises made on the dust cover. Budding authors should seek out his agent however, that individual is well worth his fee!
Rating: 
Summary: Order in the universe
Review: Science has opened the windows to the cold light of agnosticism by pushing back religion and diminishing the power of dogma. Universality in turn, shows that we are intimately connected to he universe in a most liberating sense. Universality emphasizes the interconnections between the elements of a system, whether these are the neurons in the brain or the droplets of water in a cloud. It also demonstrates that there is always a cause and that correlations can persist over very long spatial or temporal distances. The rise of universality is a result of the intellectual revolution started by chaos mathematics. In other words, universality is about the invisible force in the universe that is ubiquitous but still nameless, a force of order that is extremely powerful yet gentle. Ward examines the theories of universality, how they fit into a quest to discover the workings of the universe. He explores their possible limitations and considers what we can do with this new knowledge. He looks at the work of scientists Leo Kadanoff, Kenneth Wilson, Benoit Mandelbrot, Gene Stanley and Per Bak. The most interesting sections to me are those on the role of fractal patterns in our concept of beauty, fractals in the music of Bach and Beethoven and in Phil Thompson's work "Organised Chaos" of 1998 (which is based on the Mandelbrot set) and the determinable rhythms in finance and economics. Although modern physics is revealing more and more about particles (the very small) and the universe (the very large), it has not been focused on revealing much about the mundane and our everyday lives. Universality does this, in demonstrating how our bodies, our behaviour and nature are intimately connected. All of these different systems share a common principle, a single dynamic and a universal affinity. The author does not go into detailed discussions and theorising, for which I am grateful, as the text remains accessible enough for the general reader. What the book does reveal provides enough food for thought at this stage. The book includes portraits of the above-mentioned scientists, pictures of fractal patterns in leaves and lungs and migrating antelope, plus the fractal patterns in a work by Jackson Pollock. I recommend this book to all who are interested in cosmology, chaos theory and the golden mean (sacred geometry).
Rating:
Summary: Lots of speculation, no substance
Review: The book is disjointed and speculative so that it is hard to take any of the arguments seriously. It is strange to find this in a book about science, but then perhaps it is not a science book! Some remarks comparing scientific research today with demonology several hundred years ago make you wonder. It is almost as bad as 'The Web of Life' by Fritjof Capra (conversely if you liked that book, you will like this one too). Oddly enough, although the book claims not to be about Chaos but about 'Universality', it is Chaos that appears in the title. I am fairly familiar with the research into chaos theory, but having read this book I still cannot really tell you what 'Universality' is, other than that it seems to involve everything (!). In any case, the book presents even the better data on the subject poorly. On a general note, in thinking of fractals (discussed extensively but loosely in the book) I wonder if we are not over-interpreting the data. After all, mathematicians have known all along that mathematical models can represent a variety of natural processes and yet have no causal relation to them. Similarly, when we see fractals in a wide variety of biological structures and processes, is it because fractals are fundamental to them, or because, as I suspect, a fractal can be used to model anything? Is it the chicken or the egg?
Rating: 
Summary: Know it's place
Review: Understanding why you're reading this book makes all the difference. I used this book as a carefree nightly read around an interesting topic, and it worked! Using this book to solve problems would be a mistake. There's not enough detail and it won't work.
The author approached Universality from enough angles to brighten my world to possible unexplored connections. Unfortunately, the author's light dimmed a bit when he didn't stay "on-message" 15% of the time, wherein I skipped forward some pages. Hense, the 3 stars.
Overall, read this book as an intro, and lighten up!
Rating:
Summary: Know it's place
Review: Understanding why you're reading this book makes all the difference. I used this book as a carefree nightly read around an interesting topic, and it worked! Using this book to solve problems would be a mistake. There's not enough detail and it won't work.
The author approached Universality from enough angles to brighten my world to possible unexplored connections. Unfortunately, the author's light dimmed a bit when he didn't stay "on-message" 15% of the time, wherein I skipped forward some pages. Hense, the 3 stars.
Overall, read this book as an intro, and lighten up!
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