Related papers: The Top-Down Complexity
On the one hand, the dissipated heat of a thermodynamic work extraction process upper bounds the non-predictive information, which the associated system encodes about its environment. Thus, emergent information processing capabilities can…
How is the universe organized on large scales? How did this structure evolve from the unknown initial conditions to the present time? The answers to these questions will shed light on the cosmology we live in, the amount, composition and…
We investigate the selective forces that promote the emergence of modularity in nature. We demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of modularity in a population of individuals that evolve in a changing environment. We show that the level of…
I argue that if a special science satisfies certain key assumptions that are familiar from physicalist accounts of the special sciences and from physics, then its causal regularities have an associated notion of entropy, and that this…
Recent observations on the large-scale structure of the universe indicate that the cosmological constant cannot be the definitive answer to the nature of dark energy. Therefore, it is a good time to propose alternatives to understand the…
Although most networks in nature exhibit complex topology the origins of such complexity remains unclear. We introduce a model of a growing network of interacting agents in which each new agent's membership to the network is determined by…
Microphysical laws are time reversible, but macrophysics, chemistry and biology are not. This chapter explores how this asymmetry (a classic example of a broken symmetry) arises due to the cosmological context, where a non-local Direction…
When a large number of similar entities interact among each other and with their environment at a low scale, unexpected outcomes at higher spatio-temporal scales might spontaneously arise. This nontrivial phenomenon, known as emergence,…
The universal validity of the second law of thermodynamics is widely attributed to a finely tuned initial condition of the universe. This creates a problem: why is the universe atypical? We suggest that the problem is an artefact created by…
The discovery ten years ago that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating put in place the last major building block of the present cosmological model, in which the Universe is composed of 4% baryons, 20% dark matter, and 76% dark…
A set of cosmological models that takes into account the variation of the particle number is presented. In this context both dark matter and dark energy can be explained using a single component, without assuming any exotic equation of…
We develop a new approach to building cosmological models, in which small pieces of perturbed Minkowski space are joined together at reflection-symmetric boundaries in order to form a global, dynamical space-time. Each piece of this…
A quite general interaction process of a multi-component system is analysed by the extended effective potential method liberated from usual limitations of perturbation theory or integrable model. The obtained causally complete solution of…
The purpose of the paper is five-fold: (a) Argue that the question in the title can be presented in a meaningful manner and that it requires an answer. (b) Discuss the conventional answers and explain why they are unsatisfactory. (c)…
This paper argues that the physics of condensed matter cannot be fully reduced to the supposedly fundamental quantum mechanical theory for all the atoms of which the system consists. In fact, there are many reasons to reject the idea that…
This article reviews the prevailing paradigm for how galaxies and larger structures formed in the universe: gravitational instability. Basic observational facts are summarized to motivate the standard cosmological framework underlying most…
In contrast to entropy, which increases monotonically, the "complexity" or "interestingness" of closed systems seems intuitively to increase at first and then decrease as equilibrium is approached. For example, our universe lacked complex…
Complex spatiotemporal patterns in nature significantly challenge reductionism-based modern science. The lack of a paradigm beyond reductionism hinders our understanding of the emergence of complexity. The diversity of countless patterns…
Complex structures often emerge from initially homogeneous or weakly correlated states. We address the apparent tension between this ordering and entropy growth through a unified framework combining semi-microscopic phase-space dynamics,…
The increase in mass of our observed expansive and isotropic relativistic Universe in the present relativistic cosmology is explained by the extensive assumption of the matter objects emerging on the horizon (of the most remote visibility).…