James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.
The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself.
And then the information age arrives. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. And we sometimes feel we are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading. -- From the Hardcover edition.

内容简介

北京的一只蝴蝶拍了一下翅膀，竟引起加勒比海的飓风﹖上升的香烟柱如何破碎成缭乱的旋涡？旗帜如何在风中前后飘拂？龙头滴水如何从稳定样式变成随机样式？在混沌理论出现后，你已经不能再用传统的眼光和简单的因果关系去理解这个世界了。混沌现象在人们的生活中无处不在！它出现在大气和海洋的湍流中，它出现在飞机的飞翔中，它出现在高速公路上阻塞的汽车群体中，它出现在野生动物种群数的涨落、心脏和大脑的振动以及地下管道的油流中……
所谓“混沌”，是指看来遵从确定规律的事物也会显现超乎想象的繁复多样，只要有些微的条件差异，就会导致令人瞠目结舌的不同结果。这个蓬勃发展中的理论是继相对论和量子力学问世以来，20世纪物理学的第三次大革命，其覆盖面广及自然科学与社会科学的几乎各个领域。它不仅改变了天文学家看待太阳系的方式，而且开始改变企业家做出保险决策的方式，改变政治家谈论紧张局势导致武装冲突的方式等等。混沌理论正促成整个现代知识体系成为新科学。
《混沌》是美国最伟大的科普畅销书作家詹姆斯·格雷克的成名之作，先后获得1987年美国国家非文学类图书奖提名奖、英国非文学类最佳畅销书等荣誉，至今已有19种外文版本，全球风靡。在本书中，作者以科学记者的专业素养，深入浅出地记录了混沌现象的研究历程，写就了一部图文并茂的报告文学。科学家超乎常人的敏锐、执着和创造力，以及追寻真理过程的沮丧和欢欣，都透过作者鲜活的文笔，一一呈现。

作者简介
詹姆斯·格雷克(James Gleick)，美国最伟大的科普畅销书作家，1954年生于纽约，毕业于哈佛大学。毕业后先到明尼亚博利斯市（Minneapolis）创办《Metropolis》周报，于1977年返回纽约，在《纽约时报》担任编辑及采访记者十年，成为著名的科技专栏作家。格雷克目前已出版数部十分畅销的科普著作，其中《混沌》，《费曼传》以及《牛顿传》（以上三本书都已由高等教育出版社引进出版）等书多次获得美国国家非文学类图书奖提名，英国非文学类最佳畅销书等奖项，被译作近30种语言，行销全球。



1 蝴蝶效应
2 旋动——革命
3 生命中的起起落落
4 大自然的几何学
5 奇异吸引子
6 普适性
7 实验者
8 混沌的图象
9 研究动力系统的四人集团
10 内在节律
11 混沌与未来
12 混沌科学在中国
13 日本与苏联混沌科学中的故事

Few writers distinguish themselves by their ability to write about complicated, even obscure topics clearly and engagingly. In Chaos, James Gleick, a former science writer for the New York Times, shows that he resides in this exclusive category. Here he takes on the job of depicting the first years of the study of chaos--the seemingly random patterns that characterise many natural phenomena.
This is not a purely technical book. Instead, it focuses as much on the scientists studying chaos as on the chaos itself. In the pages of Gleick's book, the reader meets dozens of extraordinary and eccentric people. For instance, Mitchell Feigenbaum, who constructed and regulated his life by a 26-hour clock and watched his waking hours come in and out of phase with those of his coworkers at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
As for chaos itself, Gleick does an outstanding job of explaining the thought processes and investigative techniques that researchers bring to bear on chaos problems. Rather than attempt to explain Julia sets, Lorenz attractors and the Mandelbrot Set with gigantically complicated equations, Chaos relies on sketches, photographs and Gleick's wonderful descriptive prose. --Christine Buttery

James Gleick, the author of the bestsellers Chaos and Genius , brings us his crowning work: a revelatory chronicle that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality—the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.
The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanished as soon as it was born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long misunderstood “talking drums” of Africa, James Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer; Ada Byron, the poet’s brilliant and doomed daughter, who became the first true programmer; pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing; and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself.
And then the information age comes upon us. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. And they sometimes feel they are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading. It will transform readers’ view of its subject.