Highly effective thinking is an art that engineers and scientists can be taught to develop. By presenting actual experiences and analyzing them as they are described, the author conveys the developmental thought processes employed and shows a style of thinking that leads to successful results is something that can be learned. Along with spectacular successes, the author also conveys how failures contributed to shaping the thought processes.
Provides the reader with a style of thinking that will enhance a person's ability to function as a problem-solver of complex technical issues. Consists of a collection of stories about the author's participation in significant discoveries, relating how those discoveries came about and, most importantly, provides analysis about the thought processes and reasoning that took place as the author and his associates progressed through engineering problems.

Just as the telescope opened up the universe and the microscope revealed the secrets of the microcosm, the computer is now opening an exciting new window on the nature of reality. Through its capacity to process what is too complex for the unaided mind, the computer enables us for the first time to simulate reality, create models of complex systems like large molecules, chaotic systems, neural nets, the human body and brain, and patterns of evolution and population growth. With refreshing clarity, physicist and author Heinz Pagels brings us a readable, revealing report on how the revolutionary conjunction of computer technology and the new sciences of complexity is influencing every major aspect of our society--universities and corporations, physics, biology, finance, telecommunications, the legal profession, and the military. He tells why the nations and the people who master the new sciences of complexity will be the economic, cultural, and political superpowers of the next century. And he provides an extraordinary glimpse of the civilization that will arise from this synthesis of technology and the new sciences--a vision of a new world empowered by the liberating capacity of unlimited knowledge. Book jacket.