This is an acclaimed book intended for the general reader who is interested in science. The author is a physicist who is well-known for his development of the property called 'self-organized criticality', a property or phenomenon that lies at the heart of large dynamical systems. It can be used to analyse systems that are complicated, and which are part of the new science of complexity. It is a unifying concept that can be used to study phenomena in fields as diverse as economics, astronomy, the earth sciences, and physics. The author discusses his discovery of self-organized criticality; its relation to the world of classical physics; computer simulations and experiments which aid scientists' understanding of the property; and the relation of the subject to popular areas such as fractal geometry and power laws; cellular automata, and a wide range of practical applications.
