When contemplating cataclysms of nature or human history, we tend to ascribe their occurrence to dramatic causes. Buchanan here presents an outlook opposing that propensity, arguing that tiny, unremarkable events will, from time to time, cause disastrous earthquakes, mass extinctions, stock-market collapses, forest fires, world wars--almost anything. A physicist, Buchanan takes his cue from colleagues who have studied, through computer-game-playing programs, the behavior of systems over time: one such program adds grain after grain to a sand pile in an attempt to explain the ensuing avalanches. The programmers have discerned that the digital pile exists in a perpetual "critical state," in which it is impossible to predict which additional grain will trigger a sand slide. Overall, the sand slides exhibit a pattern that "implies that large events are just magnified copies of smaller ones, and that they arise from the same kinds of causes." Human society similarly experiences unpredictable disruptions over history--or so Buchanan maintains in this able, well-researched presentation of a provocative theory.
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