Forget fiendish formulas and take a look at bubbling mixtures, poisonous potions, bangs and blasts. Discover what substances lurk in your dinner, the sickening stench of the world's worst stink bomb and which awful acids will eat you alive. Redesigned in a bold, funky new look for the next generation of HORRIBLE SCIENCE fans.
True deterministic chaos is characterized by unpredictable, apparently random motion in a dynamical system completely described by a deterministic dynamic law, usually a nonlinear differential equation, with no stochastic component. The inability to predict future behavior of a chaotic system occurs because trajectories evolving from arbitrarily close initial conditions diverge. Chaos is universal as it may arise in any system governed by one of a class of quite common, suitable nonlinear dynamic laws. This book discusses both the experimental observation and theoretical interpretation of chaos in chemical and biochemical systems. Examples are drawn from the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, surface reactions, electrochemical reactions, enzyme reactions, and periodically perturbed oscillating systems.
Just a few decades ago, chemical oscillations were thought to be exotic reactions of only theoretical interest. Now known to govern an array of physical and biological processes, including the regulation of the heart, these oscillations are being studied by a diverse group across the sciences. This book is the first introduction to nonlinear chemical dynamics written specifically for chemists. It covers oscillating reactions, chaos, and chemical pattern formation, and includes numerous practical suggestions on reactor design, data analysis, and computer simulations. Assuming only an undergraduate knowledge of chemistry, the book is an ideal starting point for research in the field. The book begins with a brief history of nonlinear chemical dynamics and a review of the basic mathematics and chemistry. The authors then provide an extensive overview of nonlinear dynamics, starting with the flow reactor and moving on to a detailed discussion of chemical oscillators. Throughout the authors emphasize the chemical mechanistic basis for self-organization. The overview is followed by a series of chapters on more advanced topics, including complex oscillations, biological systems, polymers, interactions between fields and waves, and Turing patterns. Underscoring the hands-on nature of the material, the book concludes with a series of classroom-tested demonstrations and experiments appropriate for an undergraduate laboratory.
This textbook is aimed at newcomers to nonlinear dynamics and chaos, especially students taking a first course in the subject. The presentation stresses analytical methods, concrete examples, and geometric intuition. The theory is developed systematically, starting with first-order differential equations and their bifurcations, followed by phase plane analysis, limit cycles and their bifurcations, and culminating with the Lorenz equations, chaos, iterated maps, period doubling, renormalization, fractals, and strange attractors.
What makes a stink bomb stink? Why aren't glass eyes made of glass? Bubbling over with chaotic chemistry facts, this book also reveals the secrets of some very strange scientists, offers experiments to try at home, and much more!
True deterministic chaos is characterized by unpredictable, apparently random motion in a dynamical system completely described by a deterministic dynamic law, usually a nonlinear differential equation, with no stochastic component. The inability to predict future behavior of a chaotic system occurs because trajectories evolving from arbitrarily close initial conditions diverge. Chaos is universal as it may arise in any system governed by one of a class of quite common, suitable nonlinear dynamic laws. This book discusses both the experimental observation and theoretical interpretation of chaos in chemical and biochemical systems. Examples are drawn from the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, surface reactions, electrochemical reactions, enzyme reactions, and periodically perturbed oscillating systems.
This textbook is aimed at newcomers to nonlinear dynamics and chaos, especially students taking a first course in the subject. The presentation stresses analytical methods, concrete examples, and geometric intuition. The theory is developed systematically, starting with first-order differential equations and their bifurcations, followed by phase plane analysis, limit cycles and their bifurcations, and culminating with the Lorenz equations, chaos, iterated maps, period doubling, renormalization, fractals, and strange attractors.
This volume is concerned with the theoretical description of patterns and instabilities and their relevance to physics, chemistry, and biology. More specifically, the theme of the work is the theory of nonlinear physical systems with emphasis on the mechanisms leading to the appearance of regular patterns of ordered behavior and chaotic patterns of stochastic behavior. The aim is to present basic concepts and current problems from a variety of points of view. In spite of the emphasis on concepts, some effort has been made to bring together experimental observations and theoretical mechanisms to provide a basic understanding of the aspects of the behavior of nonlinear systems which have a measure of generality. Chaos theory has become a real challenge to physicists with very different interests and also in many other disciplines, of which astronomy, chemistry, medicine, meteorology, economics, and social theory are already embraced at the time of writing. The study of chaos-related phenomena has a truly interdisciplinary charac ter and makes use of important concepts and methods from other disciplines. As one important example, for the description of chaotic structures the branch of mathematics called fractal geometry (associated particularly with the name of Mandelbrot) has proved invaluable. For the discussion of the richness of ordered structures which appear, one relies on the theory of pattern recognition. It is relevant to mention that, to date, computer studies have greatly aided the analysis of theoretical models describing chaos.
