Send them qubits. Anything. Just make sure it doesn't pop out of existence, and it actually makes it there. I was prepared to hate this book, and it sat on my Kindle for about a year before I finally read it. I am an Electrical Engineer, a group not normally enamored with mathematicians, since Engineering is, almost by definition, the avoidance of pure math.

Apparently this book made a big splash when it was first published. I remember the excitement around chaos theory and fractals at the time. Chaos: Making a New Science was the first popular book about chaos theory. It describes the Mandelbrot set, Julia sets, and Lorenz attractors without using complicated mathematics. It portrays the efforts of dozens of scientists whose separate work contributed to the developing field. The text remains in print and is widely used as an introduction to the topic for the mathematical layperson. The book approaches the history of chaos theory chronologically, starting with Edward Norton Lorenz and the butterfly effect, through Mitchell Feigenbaum, and ending with more modern applications.In the 1950s, scientists were highly optimistic about the possibilities of predicting – even manipulating – the weather. This hope lay in new computer technology. New beliefs, new definitions. The Second Law, the snowflake puzzle, and loaded dice. Opportunity and necessity.

distances via a tonal drum language with built in redundancy. I loved reading about Babbage and his calculating machine, and to think about it as a kind of steam-punk calculator fantasy world of the future. I loved reading about people decrying the telegraph and the telephone as technologies that will ruin humanity. And to read about the shortening of telegraph messages to save time and money, with phrases like wyegfef which stands for 'will you exchange gold for eastern funds?' which is interesting because here we are in 2012 Science is just one of the ways to understand nature. It is arguably the best way. But even science doesn't have all the answers. It is subjectively elegant and delicate though. There lies an inherent beauty in the simplicity of its systemization. A heady ephemerality that is often missed by those who prostrate at its altar. Worship of science defiles its method and thus destroys in essence what is being worshipped. which says that you can't look at a quantum particle without effecting it, so in effect the intercepter cannot go undetected! This blew my mind. I loved reading the more philosophical chapters about how we have too much information for us to ever process, and how we must now deal with it. I loved reading about the library of babel and borges of course, how could I not? I loved thinking about how we have too much information and how everything is documented. "It did not occur to Sophocle's audiences that it would be sad for his plays to be lost; they enjoyed the show". I thought about that and I thought A new start at Los Alamos. The renormalization group. Decoding color. The rise of numerical experimentation. Mitchell Feigenbaum’s breakthrough. A universal theory. The rejection letters. Meeting in Como. Clouds and paintings.I realised how much I was enjoying the book when I found myself twiddling my thumbs one lunch hour at work and decided to plot a simple bifurcation chart! Came out pretty nicely for something done off the cuff! In all of science there lie deep and irresolute fissures that necessitate the existence of many mutually exclusive domains of knowledge. Each with its own lexicon, icons, dogmas, turfs to defend and legacies to uphold. Each operating relatively independently with little communication with or interest in what goes on outside their four walls. We make our own storehouses. The persistence of information, the difficulty of forgetting, so characteristic of our time, accretes confusion." Actually, keep it simple. Send this: 01000001 01001101 01000101 01010010 01001001 01000011 01000001 00100000 01001000 01000001 01010011 00100000 01000110 01000001 01001100 01001100 01000101 01001110 00100001 00100000 01010111 01000101 00100000 01000011 01000001 01001100 01001100 00100000 01010101 01010000 01001111 01001110 00100000 01011001 01001111 01010101 00100001