'he year was 1889. The French physicist-mathematician Henry T Poincare could not believe his eyes. He had worked for months on one of the most famous problems in science-the problem of three bodies moving around one another under mutual gravita tional attraction-and what he was seeing dismayed and trou bled him. Since Newton's time it had been assumed that the problem was solvable. All that was needed was a little ingenuity and considerable perseverance, but Poincare saw that this was not the case. Strange, unexplainable things happened when he delved into the problem; it was not solvable after all. Poincare was shocked and dismayed by the result-so disheartened he left the problem and went on to other things. What Poincare was seeing was the first glimpse of a phe nomenon we now call chaos. With his discovery the area lay dormant for almost 90 years. Not a single book was written about the phenomenon, and only a trickle of papers appeared. Then, about 1980 a resurgence of interest began, and thousands of papers appeared along with dozens of books. The new science of chaos was born and has attracted as much attention in recent years as breakthroughs in superconductivity and superstring theory.

From award-winning science writer Barry Parker, the only book to consider chaos theory in all areas of astronomy.

All over the world people look forward to a perfect future, when the forces of good will be finally victorious over the forces of evil. Once this was a radically new way of imagining the destiny of the world and of mankind. How did it originate, and what kind of world-view preceded it? In this engrossing book, the author of the classic work The Pursuit of the Millennium takes us on a journey of exploration, through the world-views of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, through the innovations of Iranian and Jewish prophets and sages, to the earliest Christian imaginings of heaven on earth. Until around 1500 B.C., it was generally believed that once the world had been set in order by the gods, it was in essence immutable. However, it was always a troubled world. By means of flood and drought, famine and plague, defeat in war, and death itself, demonic forces threatened and impaired it. Various combat myths told how a divine warrior kept the forces of chaos at bay and enabled the world to survive. Sometime between 1500 and 1200 B.C., the Iranian prophet Zoroaster broke from that static yet anxious world-view, reinterpreting the Iranian version of the combat myth. For Zoroaster, the world was moving, through incessant conflict, toward a conflictless state--"cosmos without chaos." The time would come when, in a prodigious battle, the supreme god would utterly defeat the forces of chaos and their human allies and eliminate them forever, and so bring an absolutely good world into being. Cohn reveals how this vision of the future was taken over by certain Jewish groups, notably the Jesus sect, with incalculable consequences. Deeply informed yet highly readable, this magisterial book illumines a major turning-point in the history of human consciousness. It will be mandatory reading for all who appreciated The Pursuit of the Millennium.

Philip Schaff is considered the founder of the discipline of church history in America, and he was the foremost practitioner of that discipline in nineteenth-century America. In this book Stephen R. Graham provides the first in-depth treatment of Schaff's analysis of religion in American and, by means of that study, examines not only Schaff's thought but also the development of religion in the United States in the nineteenth century. Topics covered include the three "threats" to American Christianity as conceived by Schaff -- sectarianism, romanism, and rationalism; Schaff's understanding of the American experiment of separation of church and state; Schaff's conception of America as playing a unique role in world and Christian history; and Schaff's contributions to ecumenism.

New transdisciplinary studies have been appearing not only in such established areas as biochemistry or social psychology; there are presently emerging inter-scientific fields such as sociobiology, econophysics and last but not least sociophysics. The latter is a renewed attempt to combine the latest natural and social science theories and come up with significant generalisations for both. Using the powerful physics metaphor as an inertial guidance system, sociophysics emphasises the underlying similarities between all systems. This new scientific hybrid is raising much controversy as well as revealing great promise; for this reason, it has been chosen to provide the core and focus for this book. The holistic scope of this book makes it an appropriate reference work in many courses, such as: Global Ecology; Evolutionary Biology; Macroeconomics; Sociological Theory; Philosophy of Social Science; Theoretical Physics; Thermodynamics; Macro-history; Behavioural Science; General Systems Theory; and Interdisciplinary Studies.

Writing in 1940, the prominent German art historian Erwin Panofsky asked, "How, then, is it possible to build up art history as a respectable scholarly discipline, if its objects come into being by an irrational and subjective process?" In Chaos and Cosmos, Karen Lang addresses the power of art to resist the pressures of the transcendental vantage point-history. Uncovering the intellectual and cultural richness of the early years of academic art history in Germany--the period from the 1880s to 1940--she explores various attempts within art history to transform aesthetic phenomena--chaos--into the cosmos of a systematic, unified field of inquiry.Lang starts by examining Panofsky's approach to aesthetic phenomena in his early theoretical essays alongside Ernst Cassirer's contemporaneous publications on the substance and function of scientific concepts (and on Einstein's theory of relativity). She then turns to the subject of aesthetic judgment through a rereading of Kantian subjectivity and Kant's uneasy legacy in art history. From here, Lang considers the different organizing theories of symbolic form proposed by Aby Warburg and Cassirer, as well as Goethe's inspiration for both; Alois Riegl's notion of age value and Walter Benjamin's conceptions of the aura; concluding with an extended examination of objectivity and the figure of the art connoisseur.Extensively illustrated with works of art from the Enlightenment to the present day, this venturesome book illuminates an intellectual legacy that has profoundly shaped the study of the history of art in ways that have, until now, been largely unacknowledged. Addressing the interplay of chaos and cosmos in terms of history, art history, philosophy, and epistemology, Lang traces shifts in point of view in art history and the way these shifts change aesthetic objects into historical objects, and even objects of knowledge.

Matter Over Mind begins with a thought-provoking journey through the Cosmos to illustrate the startling contrast between nature’s chaotic but rich processes, and the human mind’s organized but under performing habits. This book reveals how humanity could achieve even greater heights if we allow ourselves to rethink how we think. Chaos theory, which is wonderfully explained in this book, is a foundational recipe in nature and large group behavior. Abstract thinking is the opposite force that leads to frustrating inconsistencies in society and even limitations in technology. Viewing the world through both lenses illuminates the deeper dynamics of the world and a better way forward for humanity.