Related papers: Introduction to Statistical Physics outside Physic…
The present review is based on the lectures that the author had been giving during several years at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich). Being bounded by lecture frames, the selection of the material, by…
Global climate change, extreme climate events, earthquakes and their accompanying natural disasters pose significant risks to humanity. Yet due to the nonlinear feedbacks, strategic interactions and complex structure of the Earth system,…
In this article, we reflect upon our positive experiences incorporating or working on extra credit projects in algebra-based introductory physics that asked students to connect physics with humanities, social sciences, and everyday life. We…
Complex macroscopic behaviour can arise in many-body systems with only very simple elements as a consequence of the combination of competition and inhomogeneity. This paper attempts to illustrate how statistical physics has driven this…
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…
I briefly summarize the prospects for extending our understanding of physics beyond the standard model within the next five years.
It has been reported that students often leave the introductory physics classroom believing that physics is less connected to the real world than when they entered. In this paper we aim to complicate that narrative by considering students'…
Superstatistics is a superposition of two different statistics relevant for driven nonequilibrium systems with a stationary state and intensive parameter fluctuations. It contains Tsallis statistics as a special case. After briefly…
The appeal of thermodynamics to problems outside physics is undeniable, as is the growing recognition of its apparent universality, yet in the absence of a rigorous formalism divorced from the peculiarities of molecular systems all attempts…
The job of a physicist is to describe Nature. General features, hypotheses and theories help to describe physics phenomena at a more abstract, fundamental level, and are sometimes tacitly assigned some sort of real existence; doing so…
Increasingly, the physics community is attending to issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion, both in language and action. We are more publicly recognizing our individual responsibilities as physicists to address social injustice and…
The methods of statistical mechanics are applied to two-dimensional foams under macroscopic agitation. A new variable -- the total cell curvature -- is introduced, which plays the role of energy in conventional statistical thermodynamics.…
The philosophical foundations of statistics involve issues in theoretical statistics, such as goals and methods to meet these goals, and interpretation of the meaning of inference using statistics. They are related to the philosophy of…
Econophysics is an approach to quantitative economy using ideas, models, conceptual and computational methods of statistical physics. In recent years many of physical theories like theory of turbulence, scaling, random matrix theory or…
The state of our understanding of cosmology is reviewed from an astrophysical cosmologist point of view with a particular emphasis given to recent observations and their impact. Discussion is then presented on the implications for particle…
Econophysics embodies the recent upsurge of interest by physicists into financial economics, driven by the availability of large amount of data, job shortage in physics and the possibility of applying many-body techniques developed in…
With the possible exception of gambling, meteorology, particularly precipitation forecasting, may be the area with which the general public is most familiar with probabilistic assessments of uncertainty. Despite the heavy use of stochastic…
I present a brief overview of some exciting possibilities for physics Beyond the Standard Model. I include short discussions of neutrino physics, the strong CP problem and axions, GUTs, large and warped extra dimensions, Little Higgs models…
We consider fundamental physical constants which are among a few of the most important pieces of information we have learned about Nature after its intensive centuries-long studies. We discuss their multifunctional role in modern physics…
Statistical physics provides a useful perspective for the analysis of many complex systems; it allows us to relate microscopic fluctuations to macroscopic observations. Developmental biology, but also cell biology more generally, are…