Related papers: The Natural Science Underlying Big History
One signature of an expanding universe is the time-variation of the cosmological abundances of its different components. For example, a radiation-dominated universe inevitably gives way to a matter-dominated universe, and critical moments…
Research in quantitative evolutionary genomics and systems biology led to the discovery of several universal regularities connecting genomic and molecular phenomic variables. These universals include the log-normal distribution of the…
The modelling of massive star evolution is a complex task, and is very sensitive to the way physical processes (such as convection, rotation, mass loss, etc.) are included in stellar evolution code. Moreover, the very high observed fraction…
In physics, I noticed subjects not explained by formulas were often not studied, like how uncontrolled growth systems changed form. Weather, businesses, societies, environments, communities, cultures, groups, relationships, lives, and…
The most successful cosmological models to date envision structure formation as a hierarchical process in which gravity is constantly drawing lumps of matter together to form increasingly larger structures. Clusters of galaxies currently…
We argue for a convergence of crystallography, materials science and biology, that will come about through asking materials questions about biology and biological questions about materials, illuminated by considerations of information. The…
Cellular systems are observed everywhere in nature, from crystal domains in metals, soap froth and cucumber cells to the network of cosmological voids. Surprisingly, despite their disparate scale and origin all cellular systems follow…
Many of the numbers appearing in the laws of physics, such as the strength of electromagnetism or the masses of elementary particles, must lie in precise ranges for stars, planets, and chemistry to exist. Why the universe has these values…
First, this paper broaches the definition of science and the epistemic yield of tenets and approaches: phenomenological (descriptive only), well-founded (solid first principles, conducive to deep understanding), provisional (falsifiable if…
We often associate compound growth with the Anthropocene and our overwhelming economic impacts on the Earth. Today our actual choices for future society appear to lie with studying the class of emergent natural systems that first develop by…
In this review, the formation, evolution, and decay of the large-scale structure of the Universe is discussed in the context of observational data, numerical simulations, and the Cosmological Standard Model (CSM). Problems concerning…
As observers of the universe we are quantum physical systems within it. If the universe is very large in space and/or time, the probability becomes significant that the data on which we base predictions is replicated at other locations in…
The secular evolution process, which slowly transforms the morphology of a galaxy over its lifetime, could naturally account for observed properties of the great majority of physical galaxies if both stellar and gaseous accretion processes…
To understand the evolution of galaxies, we need to know as accurately as possible how many galaxies were present in the Universe at different epochs. Galaxies in the young Universe have hitherto mainly been identified using their expected…
We analyse the evolution of cosmological perturbations which leads to the formation of large voids in the distribution of galaxies. We assume that perturbations are spherical and all components of the Universe - radiation, matter and dark…
Understanding the dynamical behavior of many-particle systems both in and out of equilibrium is a central issue in both statistical mechanics and complex systems theory. One question involves "nature versus nurture": given a system with a…
Complexity science offers a wide range of measures for quantifying unpredictability, structure, and information. Yet, a systematic conceptual organization of these measures is still missing. We present a unified framework that locates…
Measurement in biological systems became a subject of concern as a consequence of numerous reports on limited reproducibility of experimental results. To reveal origins of this inconsistency, we have examined general features of biological…
This paper outlines astrophysical issues related to the long term fate of the universe. We consider the evolution of planets, stars, stellar populations, galaxies, and the universe itself over time scales which greatly exceed the current…
Stars, and collections of stars, encode rich signatures of stellar physics and galaxy evolution. With properties influenced by both their environment and intrinsic nature, stars retain information about astrophysical phenomena that are not…