Sync by Steven Strogatz

Sync

The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order

Steven Strogatz

Hyperion, 2003

331 pages

ISBN 0-7868-6844-9

For 300 years intrepid travelers came back from Malaysia with stories about the trees along miles of river bank flashing in unison. The travelers were so awestruck and their claims that fireflies could synchronize over long distances was so fantastic that scientists spent an equal amount of time explaining the reports away as eye blinks, humidity or other causes. In the end the reports were proven true. This story begins the saga of Sync, in which Steven Strogatz takes us through the modern investigation of spontaneous synchronization in nature, artifacts, and society.

This book is fun to read and exceptionally informative. Strogatz does an incredible job of presenting concepts at the core of scientific research without relying on mathematical formulas. Readers won’t even need to brush off their high school algebra. He manages to explain even aspects of quantum mechanics and laser generation in terms that non-scientists can understand.

Sync gives a window into the lives and thought processes of the scientists who struggle to name and study phenomena that, until the advent of computers, couldn’t be approached by mathematical means. Why do 80% of blind people have erratic sleep patterns? Why do pendulum clocks sitting on a shelf synchronize with one another? How does the synchronized electrical field that leads to heart fibrillation arise? What turns a crowd into a mob? Why are there gaps in the asteroid belt? All of these questions at their deepest levels are connected to spontaneous synchronization, and the evidence thus far shows similarity in how that synchronization is structured.

Unlike some “new science” books that rely heavily on hype and hyperbole, Strogatz is careful to present both the evidence for and against various hypotheses. He relishes pointing out unanswered questions that may well propel some readers into a life of scientific research.

Two decades ago James Gleick’s Chaos: The Making of a New Science became my all time favorite popular science book and affected the course of my future studies and hobbies. Sync has just joined it on its pedestal.

For readers who remember calculus and differential equations and want to dig into the mathematics of nonlinear dynamics, I highly recommend Strogatz’s text Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos, published by Westview Press (Perseus) in 1994. It was my first nonlinear dynamics text, and it was so well done that I still pull it out from time to time.