Related papers: Physics and Complexity: a brief spin glass perspec…
In the so-called "microscopic" models of vehicular traffic, attention is paid explicitly to each individual vehicle each of which is represented by a "particle"; the nature of the "interactions" among these particles is determined by the…
The goal of this paper is the identification of the physical processes at the origin of the nonlinear behavior of a plasma conductor when an external constraint gradually departs the system from thermal equilibrium. This reveals the…
A measure of complexity based on a probabilistic description of physical systems is proposed. This measure incorporates the main features of the intuitive notion of such a magnitude. It can be applied to many physical situations and to…
We study the emergence of Boltzmann's law for the "single particle energy distribution" in a closed system of interacting classical spins. It is shown that for a large number of particles Boltzmann's law may occur, even if the interaction…
I give a highly selective overview of the way statistical mechanics explains the microscopic origins of the time asymmetric evolution of macroscopic systems towards equilibrium and of first order phase transitions in equilibrium. These…
Except for crystalline or random structures, an agreed definition of complexity for intermediate and hence interesting cases does not exist. We fill this gap with a notion of complexity that characterises shapes formed by any finite number…
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…
Dynamics of systems of structured particles consisting of potentially interacting material points is considered in the framework of classical mechanics. Equations of interaction and motion of structured particles have been derived. The…
The binary hard-sphere mixture is one of the simplest representations of a many-body system with competing time and length scales. This model is relevant to fundamentally understand both the structural and dynamical properties of materials,…
While "complexity science" has achieved significant successes in several interdisciplinary fields such as economics and biology, it is only a very recent observation that legal systems -- from the way legal texts are drafted and connected…
Understanding realistic complex systems requires confronting significant conceptual, theoretical and experimental limitations rooted in the persistence of views that originated in the mechanics of simple moving bodies. We define the…
Models can be simple for different reasons: because they yield a simple and computationally efficient interpretation of a generic dataset (e.g. in terms of pairwise dependences) - as in statistical learning - or because they capture the…
Herein we consider various concepts of entropy as measures of the complexity of phenomena and in so doing encounter a fundamental problem in physics that affects how we understand the nature of reality. In essence the difficulty has to do…
The climate system is a forced, dissipative, nonlinear, complex and heterogeneous system that is out of thermodynamic equilibrium. The system exhibits natural variability on many scales of motion, in time as well as space, and it is subject…
The concept of complexity appears in virtually all areas of knowledge. Its intuitive meaning shares similarities across fields, but disagreements between its details hinders a general definition, leading to a plethora of proposed…
Reaction systems are discrete dynamical systems inspired by bio-chemical processes, whose dynamical behaviour is expressed by set-theoretic operations on finite sets. Reaction systems thus provide a description of bio-chemical phenomena…
Theoretical challenges in understanding the nature of glass and the glass transition remain significant open questions in statistical and condensed matter physics. As a prototypical example of complex physical systems, glasses and the…
We discuss models and data of crowd disasters, crime, terrorism, war and disease spreading to show that conventional recipes, such as deterrence strategies, are often not effective and sufficient to contain them. Many common approaches do…
Active particles contain internal degrees of freedom with the ability to take in and dissipate energy and, in the process, execute systematic movement. Examples include all living organisms and their motile constituents such as molecular…
Recently it has been demonstrated that causal entropic forces can lead to the emergence of complex phenomena associated with human cognitive niche such as tool use and social cooperation. Here I show that even more fundamental traits…