Book Review: Sync

My own research runs through the story [...] because I want to give feel for what it's like to be working in the trenches of science -- the blind alleys, the twists and turns, the exhilaration of discovery, the metamorphosis from students to colleague to mentor.

-- Steven Strogatz, Sync, The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order

This book is about synchronization in physics, biology, sociology and even human behavior. S. Strogatz presents the historical evolution of the knowledge about synchronization, highlighting how pervasive this phenomenon is. Blending results in different areas, the author presents main figures of the field, main milestones of the research and connections between all of them.

Several scientific areas are covered, showing connections between them. In addition, the books contains many anecdotes and historical details, which make it enjoyable. Even though maths are removed from the text, the author pinpoint the way to dive deeper, including brief description of the technics used for the research and very good references, from which I would like to highlight one of them: The Geometry of the Biological Time, by Art Winfree.

Specially memorable for me were the chapters about small world networks and their implications in fads formation, and about the sleep periods.

So yes, very interesting and highly recommendable.