Self-organization
Full Title or Meme
Whenever any system spontaneously organizes itself without external assistance or design, it is a new kind of phenomenon.
Context
"In nature it is quite common to see systems that start disordered and featureless, but then spontaneously organize themselves to produces definite structures." [1] The first experiments focused on the power law from the natural occurrence of phenomenon like earthquakes. This evolved into Self-organization Criticality (SOC) in the work of Per Bak with sand piles.[2] and follow-on work in experimental realization.[3]How can the universe start with a few types of elementary particles at the big bang, and end up with life, history, economics, and literature? The question is screaming out to be answered bur it is seldom even asked. Why did the big bang not form a simple gas of particles, or condense into one big crystal? We see complex phenomena around us so often that we rake them for granted without looking for further explanation. In fact, until recently very little scientific effort was devoted to understanding why nature is complex.
Figure 1: Snow Crystal. In the beginning of quantum mechanics and statistical physics it was believed that a crystalline structure can be calculated by determining the minimum of the free energy. This may be true, e.g. for ionic crystals, such as sodium chloride, or metals. In this case, the Schrödinger equation for the ground state or possibly low lying states must be solved. In general, this requires the solution of a many particle problem. As the example of snow crystals shows, this picture is too narrow. It is not only necessary to calculate binding forces, but rather the whole kinetics, e.g. of dendritic growth. Besides kinetics, also symmetry, may play a decisive role, e.g. the hexagonal symmetry of the snowflake is caused by the symmetry of H2O which acts as a nucleation center. This example shows that in the formation of crystals, such as the snowflake, kinetic processes and the problem of binding forces are strongly interwoven with each other.[4]
References
- ↑ Stephan Wolfram, A New Kind of Science Wolfram (2002) ISBN 9781579550080
- ↑ Per Bak, How Nature Works - the science of self-organized criticality Springer (1996) ISBN 978-1-4757-5426-1
- ↑ Arka Banerjee, Self-organized criticality in sandpile models (2012-05-11) https://guava.physics.uiuc.edu/~nigel/courses/563/Essays_2012/PDF/banerjee.pdf
- ↑ Self-organization http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Self-organization
Other Material
- See the wiki page on Metabiology
