Related papers: Physics and Complexity
Increasing numbers of physicists engage in research activities that address biological questions from physics perspectives or strive to develop physics insights from active biological processes. The on-going development and success of such…
A complex system is a system composed of many interacting parts, often called agents, which displays collective behavior that does not follow trivially from the behaviors of the individual parts. Examples include condensed matter systems,…
Statistical physics has proven to be a very fruitful framework to describe phenomena outside the realm of traditional physics. The last years have witnessed the attempt by physicists to study collective phenomena emerging from the…
Proponents of Complexity Science believe that the huge variety of emergent phenomena observed throughout nature, are generated by relatively few microscopic mechanisms. Skeptics however point to the lack of concrete examples in which a…
Despite the spectacular achievements of molecular biology in the second half of the twentieth century and the crucial advances it permitted in cancer research, the fight against cancer has brought some disillusions. It is nowadays more and…
Rigidity is an emergent property of materials - it is not a feature of individual components that comprise the structure, but instead arises from interactions between many constituent parts. Recently, it has been recognized that…
We discuss the relevance of studying ecology within the framework of Complexity Science from a statistical mechanics approach. Ecology is concerned with understanding how systems level properties emerge out of the multitude of interactions…
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…
The intuition that a long history is required for the emergence of complexity in natural systems is formalized using the notion of depth. The depth of a system is defined in terms of the number of parallel computational steps needed to…
This book is concerned with the various aspects of hierarchical collective behaviour which is manifested by most complex systems in nature. From the many of the possible topics, we plan to present a selection of those that we think are…
Biological systems reach hierarchical complexity that has no counterpart outside the realm of biology. Undoubtedly, biological entities obey the fundamental physical laws. Can today's physics provide an explanatory framework for…
The basic laws of physics are simple, so why is the world complex? The theory of self-organized criticality posits that complex behavior in nature emerges from the dynamics of extended, dissipative systems that evolve through a sequence of…
Research at the interface between cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and the science of complex, dynamical systems, is piecing together an understanding of the creative process, including how it works, how it can be fostered, and the…
Despite the diversity of materials designated as active matter, virtually all active systems undergo a form of dynamic arrest when crowding and activity compete, reminiscent of the dynamic arrest observed in colloidal and molecular fluids…
We discuss the problems of consensus and unity in science. The natural sciences seem to contrast with many other areas of endeavor in that a high level of consensus seems to exist in them. However, a careful analysis of the structure of…
Life has a special status, it even has its own science: biology. In many ways, the logic of life seems to differ from that of atoms, molecules, planets, or any other `inanimate object'. However, life is increasingly measured using…
The purpose of this paper is to show the magic of physics by showing the physics of magic. What usually makes magic tricks interesting is that something unexpected occurs. Similarly, demonstrations are interesting inasmuch as they produce…
The dynamic instability of the living systems and the "superposition" of different forms of randomness are viewed as a component of the contingently increasing organization of life along evolution. We briefly survey how classical and…
Disordered many-body systems exhibit a wide range of emergent phenomena across different scales. These complex behaviors can be utilized for various information processing tasks such as error correction, learning, and optimization. Despite…
The objective of statistical physics is to understand macroscopic behavior of a many-body system from the interactions of the constituents of that system. When many-body systems reach critical states, simple universal and scaling behaviors…