Abstract
Terrorist attacks, floods, nuclear power meltdowns, economic collapses, political disruptions and natural events like earthquakes come and go in waves—they are bursty. Why? The modern world differs from previous generations mainly due to vast network connections that replace independent random events with highly dependent conditional events. The 21st century is an age of lop-sided long-tailed probability distributions rather than the classical Normal distribution. Like episodic waves striking the beach, modern day events come and go in bursts—most are clustered together in time and space, but occasional bursts are separated in time, space, and consequence. This model of reality is called punctuated reality, because of the wave-like behavior of the complex systems found everywhere in modern life.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Changes in a stock price obey a long-tailed distribution and so do wave intervals.
- 2.
As I will show, the rules governing much of modernity are non-parametric, non-linear, scalable, conditional, and regulated largely by extreme statistics.
- 3.
Caneva and Smirnov (2004).
Reference
Caneva, Alexander, and Vladimir Smirnov, “Using the Fractal Dimension of Earthquake Distributions and the Slope of the Recurrence Curve to Forecast Earthquakes in Columbia”, Earth Sci. Res. J. Vol. 8, No. 1 (Dec. 2004) : 3–9.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lewis, T.G. (2014). Waves. In: Book of Extremes. Copernicus, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06926-5_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06926-5_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Copernicus, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-06925-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-06926-5
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)