Related papers: Physics for the environment and sustainable develo…
Challenges due to the rapid urbanization of the world -- especially in emerging countries -- range from an increasing dependence on energy, to air pollution, socio-spatial inequalities, environmental and sustainability issues. Modelling the…
Earthquakes rank among the most destructive manifestations of the Earth's dynamics. Can they be predicted? This is often the first question students ask. To answer that right away: no, at present it is not possible to anticipate the date,…
The paper discusses the basic paradoxes of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics. The approaches to solution of these paradoxes are suggested. The first one relies on the influence of the external observer (environment), which disrupts the…
A major roadblock to effective climate education is the lack of radical visions (Kwauk, 2020) for engaging with climate change and related social-environmental crises in the classroom. Key aspects of the climate system: its inherent…
FuturICT foundations are social science, complex systems science, and ICT. The main concerns and challenges in the science of complex systems in the context of FuturICT are laid out in this paper with special emphasis on the Complex Systems…
The conventional economic approaches explore very little about the dynamics of the economic systems. Since such systems consist of a large number of agents interacting nonlinearly they exhibit the properties of a complex system. Therefore…
Life is characterized by a myriad of complex dynamic processes allowing organisms to grow, reproduce, and evolve. Physical approaches for describing systems out of thermodynamic equilibrium have been increasingly applied to living systems,…
Many natural and technological systems fail to adapt to changing external conditions and move to a different state if the conditions vary too fast. Such "non-adiabatic" processes are ubiquitous, but little understood. We identify these…
Many large-scale, complex systems consist of interactions between humans, human-made systems and the environment. The approach developed in this paper is to partition the problem space into two fundamental layers and identify, parameterize…
Resilience is a rehashed concept in natural hazard management - resilience of cities to earthquakes, to floods, to fire, etc. In a word, a system is said to be resilient if there exists a strategy that can drive the system state back to…
Like all natural systems, great societies and their cultures emerge by a growth process from their environments, developing, organized, and behaving as wholes with their internal designs linked with their external worlds. So the general…
Earthquakes occur because of abrupt slips on faults due to accumulated stress in the Earth's crust. Because most of these faults and their mechanisms are not readily apparent, deterministic earthquake prediction is difficult. For effective…
A vast body of literature addresses the complex nature of science's reproducibility crisis. In contrast with this perceived complexity, some recent papers from the discipline of physics suggests that irreproducibility does not point to a…
This paper presents a nonlinear approach to measurements a general framework for dealing with variations of environmental conditions. My method may prove promising to extensions beyond classical physics, economics, and other sciences. I…
This paper explores the idea that information is an essential and distinctive feature of living systems. Unlike non-living systems, living systems actively acquire, process, and use information about their environments to respond to…
The modeling of complex systems such as ecological or socio-economic systems can be very challenging. Although various modeling approaches exist, they are generally not compatible and mutually consistent, and empirical data often do not…
The dynamic instability of the living systems and the "superposition" of different forms of randomness are viewed as a component of the contingently increasing organization of life along evolution. We briefly survey how classical and…
Equilibrium is a rather ideal situation, the exception rather than the rule in Nature. Whenever the external or internal parameters of a physical system are varied its subsequent relaxation to equilibrium may be either impossible or take…
Resilience is a property of social, ecological, social-ecological and biophysical systems. It describes the capacity of a system to cope with, adapt to and innovate in response to a changing surrounding. Given the current climate change…
Human activity continues to have an enormous negative impact on the ability of the planet to sustain human and other forms of life. Six out of the nine planetary boundaries have been crossed, a seventh is close to threshold. Prominent…