Peter V. Coveney Libri

Wild child Huck has to get away. His violent drunk of a father is back in town again, raising Cain. He won't rest until he has Huck's money. So the enterprising boy fakes his own death and sets out in search of adventure and freedom. Teaming up with Jim, an escaped slave with a price on his head, the two fugitives go on the run, travelling down the wide Mississippi River. But Huck finds himself wrestling with his conscience. Should he save Jim, or turn his friend over to a terrible fate?

Explores how complexity, a new way of thinking about the behaviour of interacting units, is transforming the way we think, and the assumptions that underlie conventional science. Examines the rise of the electronic computer as key and catalyst to the study of complexity; explores current innovations such as fuzzy logic, and computers which exploit quantum mechanics and run on light; and reveals cyberspace universes where organisms compete for resources as they reproduce, mutate and evolve

In this book physical chemist Dr Peter Coveney and award-winning science journalist Dr Roger Highfield have questioned our understanding of science with their humorous reinterpretation of the most profound aspect of time - why it points from the past to the future. The author's challenge to scientific preconceptions about the irreversibility of time is designed to link apparently irreconcilable features of science, from Einstein's obsession with causality to chaos theory, from the cause of jet lag to the Monday morning feeling.

"This book describes the revolutionary efforts underway to build virtual humans - from cells and organs to whole bodies and populations. Virtual human technology has extraordinary potential, but also poses enormous computational challenges. Digital doppelgängers of patients will be able to usher in an era of truly personalized medicine, in which virtual drug trials can be conducted on thousands of digital twins, and "health-casts" can give you an idea of what a change in diet and lifestyle would really mean for you. Your "virtual you" will change your healthcare and potentially extend your lifespan (while also raising philosophical and ethical questions). However, numerous challenges and problems need to be solved to build such virtual versions of humans and to make truly personalized and predictive medicine possible. These challenges largely reside in the domains of the computer and physical sciences, and they are the real focus of this book. Building a "virtual you" touches on a wide range of deep scientific issues: how detailed the models need to be; what is currently possible to model; the problems inherent to simulating chaos and complexity; how to stitch together different kinds of mathematical models; the need for the realization of new forms of computing, such as quantum computation; and how all this relates to the limits of what we can simulate digitally and the future of computer modeling. The book ends on a provocative note, claiming that although we will be able to go far with next generation exascale and quantum computers, we will need to return to the technology of analog machines in order to simulate the complexity of the human body and perhaps harness the properties of special metamaterials to solve equations by manipulating beams of light"-- Provided by publisher

Podtitul: Hranice komplexity - Hledání řádu v chaotickém světě Průkopnická práce ukazující nové obzory vědy. Komplexita, hlavní téma knihy, je moderní interdisciplinární záležitostí, zabývající se souborem témat z takových vědních oborů, jako je umělá inteligence, statistická fyzika, neurobiologie, či dokonce sociologie. Komplexita je všude tam, kde hraničí chaos s řádem. Z vědeckého hlediska je složitější a zajímavější než chaos, jemuž bylo věnováno mnoho vědeckého úsilí a o němž už byla napsána řada knih. Právě tam, kde se chaos setkává s řádem, se totiž odehrávají tak úžasné věci, jako je život či myšlení. Autoři navazují na práce takových velikánů vědy, jako byl Richard Feynman, Kurt Gödel, John von Neumann, Ilya Prigogine a Alan Turing, kteří otevřeli cestu od redukcionismu ke komplexitě. S předmluvou Barucha Blumberga.

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