How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality (Bak, 1996)

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Simply in a Class by Itself, May 30, 2000
By Bruce Gregory (Deep River, Connecticut)

...Bak's treatment is detailed, clear, and balanced. When he is enthusiastic he let's you know exactly why, leaving you free to make up your own mind. The fact that most of the studies he describes were published in Physical Review Letters might tell you something about their quality. The book provides wonderful examples of the role of models in science, much better than any I've come across in rather extensive search for materials for a course on the Nature of Science I help teach. I'm reading the book for the third time (not because it is difficult to read, but simply because it repays rereading) and I admire it more with each reading. If you want to understand models that display Self Organized Criticality, this book is without question the place to go.

p.11 As pointed out by philosopher Karl Popper, prediction is our best means of distinguishing science from pseudoscience.

p.33 In 1987 Chao Tang, Kurt Wiesenfeld, and I constructed the simple, prototypical model of self-organized criticality, the sandpile model. Our calculations on the model showed how a system that obeys simple, benign local rules can organize itself into a poised state that evolves in terms of flashing, intermittent bursts rather than following a smooth path. We did not set out with the intention of studying sandpiles... the discovery of sandpile dynamics was accidental.

p.42 Our strategy is to strip the problem of all the flesh until we are left with the naked backbone and no further reduction is possible. We try to discard variables that we deem irrelevant.

p.44 The beauty of the model can be measured as the range between its own simplicity and the complexity of the phenomena that it describes, that is, by the degree to which it has allowed us to condense our description of the real world.

p.54 One quickly realizes that it is a losing strategy to make a realistic model of the sandpile, which at first glance might have seemed a reasonably simple object.

p.132 It turns out that the successful strategy was to make an even simpler model, rather than one that is more complicated. Insight seldom arises from complicated messy modeling, but more often from gross simplifications.

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