The book is written without technical jargon, and new concepts and terminology needed for the narrative are introduced gradually based on examples taken from accessible everyday life. The chapters are connected through a path that starts from exploring instabilities at the planetary scale and then passes through a description of unstable dynamics in macroscopic settings such as in human mechanical artifacts, fluid waves, animal skin, vegetation structures, and chemical reactions, finally reaching the sub atomic scale and the biological processes of human thought. Before concluding with some general philosophical remarks, a modern landscape about the possibility of seeing instabilities not only as a detrimental effect but as resources to be harnessed for technology is explored.
The book is enriched by a variety of professional anecdotes stemming from the direct research experience of the author. It features numerous connections of scientific concepts presented with other branches of the human experience and knowledge including philosophy, engineering, history of science, biology, chemistry, mathematics and computer science, poetry, and meditation.
Key Features:
- Presents an exciting introduction to the topic, which is accessible to those without a scientific background
- Explores milestone discoveries in the history of the concept of instability in physics
- Contains anecdotes of key figures from the field, including James C. Maxwell, Alan Turing, Vladimir Zakharov, Edward Lorenz, Enrico Fermi, and Mary Tsingou
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- John Dudley, The FEMTO-ST Institute, January 2024.
Usually we seek stability: in the work place, in health, in economy. However from a scientific point of view instability is much more interesting than stability as it can give origin to unpredictable and counterintuitive developments. Physicist Auro Michele Perego, researcher at the Aston Institute of Photonic Technologies (Birmingham, United Kingdom) is the author of Unstable Nature, an essay where he reviews in a pleasantly didactic way the full repertoire of instabilities, from those of planetary orbits... to the ones in chemical, biological, quantum and mathematical systems.
- Piero Bianucci, La Stampa