Related papers: More Really is Different
Why are materials with specific characteristics more abundant than others? This is a fundamental question in materials science and one that is traditionally difficult to tackle, given the vastness of compositional and configurational space.…
Predictions of emergent phenomena, appearing on the macroscopic layer of a complex system, can fail if they are made by a microscopic model. This study demonstrates and analyses this claim on a well-known complex system, Conway's Game of…
If a concept is not well defined, there are grounds for its abuse. This is particularly true of complexity, an inherently interdisciplinary concept that has penetrated very different fields of intellectual activity from physics to…
The universe is certainly not yet in total thermodynamical equilibrium,so clearly some law telling about special initial conditions is needed. A universe or a system imposed to behave periodically gets thereby required ``initial…
As David Berlinski writes (1997), the existence and nature of mathematics is a more compelling and far deeper problem than any of the problems raised by mathematics itself. Here we analyze the essence of mathematics making the main emphasis…
The 2nd law of thermodynamics yields an irreversible increase in entropy until thermal equilibrium is achieved. This irreversible increase is often assumed to require large and complex systems to emerge from the reversible microscopic laws…
When thermodynamics is understood as the science (or art) of constructing effective models of natural phenomena by choosing a minimal level of description capable of capturing the essential features of the physical reality of interest, the…
Finetuning and Naturalness are extra-empirical theory assessments that reflect our expectation how scientific theories should provide an intuitive understanding about the foundations underlying the observed phenomena. Recently, the absence…
When a dynamical system contains several different modes of oscillations it may behave in a variety of ways: If the modes oscillate at their own individual frequencies, it exhibits quasiperiodic behavior; when the modes lock to one another…
Even simplified models of quantum many-body systems can be difficult to analyse. However, taking inspiration from the foundations of physics, one may wonder whether there are practical advantages to constructing alternative beyond-quantum…
In this article, it is shown specifically that natural system chance events as represented by theory predicted (a priori) probabilistic statements used in such realms as modern particle physics, among others, are only random relative to the…
We examine the diffraction properties of lattice dynamical systems of algebraic origin. It is well-known that diverse dynamical properties occur within this class. These include different orders of mixing (or higher-order correlations), the…
Biology is considered here as an "emergent science" in the sense of Anderson and of Laughlin and Pines. It is demonstrated that a straightforward mathematical definition of "biological system" is useful in showing how biology differs in…
An attempt is made to de-mystify the apparent "paradox" between microscopic time revsersibility and macroscopic time irreversibility. It is our common experience that a hot cup of coffee cools down to room temperature and it never…
A major challenge of interdisciplinary description of complex system behaviour is whether real systems of higher complexity levels can be understood with at least the same degree of objective, "scientific" rigour and universality as…
Moir\'e patterns are omnipresent. They are important for any overlapping periodic phenomenon, from vibrational and electromagnetic, to condensed matter. Here we show, both theoretically and via experimental simulations by ultracold atoms,…
Real materials always contain, to some extent, randomness in the form of defects or irregularities. It is known since the seminal work of Anderson that randomness can drive a metallic phase to an insulating one, and the mechanism…
Entropy relates the fast, microscopic behaviour of the elements in a system to its slow, macroscopic state. We propose to use it to explain how, as complexity theory suggests, small scale decisions of individuals form cities. For this, we…
It is shown that the phenomenon of irreversibility in many-body and few-body systems can be explained and described within the framework of the concept of direct (not instantaneous) interaction of particles without using probabilistic…
Complex networks have become the main paradigm for modelling the dynamics of interacting systems. However, networks are intrinsically limited to describing pairwise interactions, whereas real-world systems are often characterized by…