Related papers: The Natural Science Underlying Big History
Throughout the evolution of biological species on Earth, cells and organs have developed many complex structures and processes to ensure their interactions with individual chemical molecules (small and macromolecular) and nanoscale objects…
The paper discusses the fundamental characteristics distinguishing the natural and social systems from each other. It considers in detail the basic approaches, prospects, and possibilities of constructing mathematical description for social…
Until recently, much of the microbial world was hidden from view. A global research effort has changed this, unveiling and quantifying microbial diversity across enormous range of critically-important contexts, from the human microbiome, to…
In a complex system, the individual components are neither so tightly coupled or correlated that they can all be treated as a single unit, nor so uncorrelated that they can be approximated as independent entities. Instead, patterns of…
The limited distinctness of physical systems is roughly expressed by uncertainty relations. Here we show distinctness is a finite resource we can exactly count to define basic physical quantities, limits to the resolution of space and time,…
The large scale structure of the present Universe is determined by the growth of dark matter density fluctuations and by the dynamical action of dark energy and dark matter. While much progress has been made in recent years in constraining…
Thermodynamics and its quantum counterpart are traditionally described with statistical ensembles. Canonical typicality has related statistical mechanics for a system to ensembles of global energy eigen- states of system and its environment…
Machine learning and deep learning techniques are contributing much to the advancement of science. Their powerful predictive capabilities appear in numerous disciplines, including chaotic dynamics, but they miss understanding. The main…
As early indicated by Charles Darwin, languages behave and change very much like living species. They display high diversity, differentiate in space and time, emerge and disappear. A large body of literature has explored the role of…
Computer modelling for evolutionary systems consists in: 1) to store in the memory the individual features of each member of a large population; and 2) to update the whole system repeatedly, as time goes by, according to some prescribed…
Quantum physics and biology have long been regarded as unrelated disciplines, describing nature at the inanimate microlevel on the one hand and living species on the other hand. Over the last decades the life sciences have succeeded in…
Through extensive studies of dynamical system modeling cellular growth and reproduction, we find evidence that complexity arises in multicellular organisms naturally through evolution. Without any elaborate control mechanism, these systems…
Many exoplanets have orbital characteristics quite different from those seen in our own solar system, including planets locked in orbital resonances and planets on orbits that are elliptical or highly inclined from their host star's spin…
Current evidence suggests that the cosmological constant is not zero, or that we live in an open universe. We examine the implications for the future under these assumptions, and find that they are striking. If the Universe is cosmological…
Nerd abstract: Observational constraints on spacetime are reviewed, focusing on how the underlying physics (dark matter, dark energy, gravity) can be tested rather than assumed. Popular abstract: Space is not a boring static stage on which…
We note that in general there exist two basic aspects in any branch of physics, including cosmology - one dealing with the attributes of basic constituents and forces of nature, the other dealing with how structures arise from them and how…
Due to the inherently nonlinear nature of gravity cosmological N-body simulations have become an invaluable tool when the growth of structure is being studied and modelled closer to the present epoch. Large simulations with high dynamical…
Their ubiquity and extreme densities make star clusters probes of prime importance of galaxy evolution. Old globular clusters keep imprints of the physical conditions of their assembly in the early Universe, and younger stellar objects,…
The study of the morphology of galaxies is important in order to understand the formation and evolution of galaxies and their sub-components as a function of luminosity, environment, and star-formation and galaxy assembly over cosmic time.…
The natural evolution of life seems to proceed through steps characterized by phases of relatively rapid changes, followed by longer, more stable periods. In the light of the string-theory derived physical scenario proposed in [1], we…