alt Hacker NewsThe Charms of Catastrophe (1978)
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The 'catastrophe machine' mentioned:
https://www.geneva.edu/dept/chemistry-math-physics/physics-r...
Very easy to throw together or simulate.
It is also worth reading Chaos Theory and the story of the scientists https://onepercentrule.substack.com/p/a-love-letter-to-chaos...
Catastrophe theory developed a bad reputation pretty quickly, today there are many retrospectives of how various fields in the social sciences lost interest
https://is.muni.cz/el/sci/jaro2018/M6201/um/48281991/RosserC...
When i was studying physics in the 1990s with the famous conspiracy (more so than string) theorist Ron Maimon we talked about it and he said it was a pale shadow of the renormalization group approach to phase transitions that was developed just a little bit earlier.
Author is Martin Gardner - that might entice some people to click through.
Wouldn't CT give Hari Seldon a way to predict discontinuous (revolutionary) political change ?
Interesting nugget: the Swallowtail Catastrophe (https://mathworld.wolfram.com/SwallowtailCatastrophe.html), one of the seven possible, was named by the blind French topologist Bernard Morin (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Morin).
It was the topic of Salvador Dali’s last work (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swallow%27s_Tail)