Related papers: The Natural Science Underlying Big History
The molecular biology revolution of the last seventy five years has transformed our view of living systems. Scientific explanations of biological phenomena are now synonymous with the identification of the genes, proteins, and signaling…
The network of cosmological tests is tight enough now to show that the relativistic Big Bang cosmology is a good approximation to what happened as the universe expanded and cooled through light element production and evolved to the present.…
The theory of evolution by natural selection cannot be used to evaluate the truth value of the following proposition: Through evolution, there exists at least one species that can adapt to any one given environment. To address this issue,…
Cosmological discoveries over the past century have completely changed our picture of our place in the universe. New observations have a realistic chance of probing nature on heretofore unimaginable scales, and as a result are changing the…
Galaxies, in particular disc galaxies, contain a number of structures and substructures with well defined morphological, photometric and kinematic properties. Considerable theoretical effort has been put into explaining their formation and…
What features characterise complex system dynamics? Power laws and scale invariance of fluctuations are often taken as the hallmarks of complexity, drawing on analogies with equilibrium critical phenomena[1-3]. Here we argue that slow,…
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…
Cooperation is a widespread natural phenomenon yet current evolutionary thinking is dominated by the paradigm of selfish competition. Recent advanced in many fronts of Biology and Non-linear Physics are helping to bring cooperation to its…
Cosmology is undergoing an explosive period of activity, fueled both by new, accurate astrophysical data and by innovative theoretical developments. Cosmological parameters such as the total density of the Universe and the rate of…
Biological systems reach organizational complexity that far exceeds the complexity of any known inanimate objects. Biological entities undoubtedly obey the laws of quantum physics and statistical mechanics. However, is modern physics…
Universe structure emerges in the unreduced, complex-dynamical interaction process with the simplest initial configuration (two attracting homogeneous fields). The unreduced interaction analysis avoiding any perturbative model gives…
It is argued that the occurrence of disproportionately ("un-natural") large (or small) numbers, as well as deep cancellations, are comparatively natural traits of the way Nature is geared to operate in most complex systems. The idea is…
Essentially everything of astronomical interest is either part of a galaxy, or from a galaxy, or otherwise relevant to the origin or evolution of galaxies. Diverse examples are that the isotropic composition of meteorites provides clues to…
We study the probabilities of evolution based on random mutations and natural selection. We conclude that evolution to multicellular eukaryots, or even prokaryots, is unlikely to be the result of only random mutations. Complex organisms…
The paper discusses the problem of demarcation between the dimensions of natural and the human sciences in contemporary cosmology. In spite of a common presumption that cosmology is a natural science, the specificity of its alleged subject…
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…
Advances in the discovery and characterization of asteroids over the past decade have revealed an unanticipated underlying structure that points to a dramatic early history of the inner Solar System. The asteroids in the main asteroid belt…
There is a widespread assumption that the universe in general, and the Earth's biosphere in particular, is becoming more complex over time. This paper formulates this assumption as a macroscopic law, the law of increasing complexity, for a…
For most of its history, cosmology was a qualitatively constrained discourse on the universe, shaped by limited observational access and the absence of global dynamical laws. This situation has changed decisively in recent decades. Modern…
Once understood as the paradigm of passively evolving objects, the discovery that massive galaxies experienced an enormous structural evolution in the last ten billion years has opened an active line of research. The most significant…