I borrowed a book from Marine Parade library, CHAOS : Making a new Science by James Gleick. It's the recommended reading for my Taming Chaos module and it is bloody INTERESTING!!

Makes me feel that all my years of studying science(physics and chemistry) in Secondary school and JC have been, as the book puts it, 'missing the point'! Engineering at NUS still retains a shred of dignity in the face of this book solely because engineering has made real and put to application all the lofty theories of physicists and chemists and such theorists to create the technological wealth of the modern world.

Traditional theorists and modern theorists of the last few decades are really put in quite a lousy light in this book. They are arrogant and ignorant, becoming wizen crones hiding in tall ivory towers, poring over arcane tomes that nobody else understood except those who are also in the field. Knowledge has become so specialised that traditionally inseparable disciplines of mathematics and physics now deem each other's latest pursuits as trivial and inconsequential, phycisists and mathematicians would use different examples to illustrate the same point, each with their own slant.

Chaos science takes a new look at the simple pendulum and discovers much more than what we already know. Just as is written in the book, the simple pendulum is where an education in physics begins, any high school or college student (such as myself) would be able to solve any question on the pendulum without breaking a sweat. Yet when faced with a real physical pendulum, any physicists would have to make a few simplifying assumptions in order to 'solve' the system. Of course as you go higher level, these assumptions reduce in number but you cannot fully take away the most basic assumption. That friction and other dissipative forces account for the slight disparities in observations. Nobody would have thought that these slight disparities are actually worthy of study! I am unable to paraphrase the full discussion in the book... you'd have to try to get your hands on it to read for yourself! It's avaliable in Borders under Engineering and Science shelves!

Pangy was pricked and bled at 10:35 PM