Sync: The emerging science of spontaneous order by Steven Strogatz, Hyperion, $24.95, ISBN 0786868449
IN THE summer of 1982, while sitting around a fire at a campsite in Wisconsin, the bushes behind me began to pulse with light. It took a few moments for this townie to figure out the cause: fireflies, flashing in sync with each other as if wired together like Christmas lights. It has taken me a couple of decades to learn that I had also witnessed something that experts once insisted never occurred in the Western hemisphere, and that defied explanation.
Exactly how a swarm of…
