Please distribute to others who may be interested... You are hereby invited to a seminar in our tenth interdisciplinary series on Evolution, Complexity and Cognition <http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/108> (ECCO 2013-2014)
Time: Friday Dec. 13, 14h-16h Place: *room D.3.16* ------------------------------ *Physical Foundations of Self-organizing Systems* Atanu Bikash Chatterjee <[email protected]> (Indian Institute of Technology Madras) *Abstract* Nature has always played an important role in shaping numerous laws of natural sciences. Be it Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation, or Darwin’s Law of Natural Selection. Even the supreme laws of nature, the law of increasing entropy namely the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Principle of Least Action are nothing but subtle manifestations of the human mind in cohesion with nature. Therefore, it wouldn’t be unfair to say that today the centrality of most of our scientific endeavours is focussed around studying, interpreting and imitating nature. However, the excitement in science that developed out of this worldview was bounded by the paradigms of Newtonian physics (mechanics). The shortcoming of this view lay in the philosophy of reductionism, according to which the ultimate truth of nature lies in investigating the lower hierarchy of any system, i.e., its constituents and formulating laws governing those entities. However, such kind of a solution strategy would often yield a highly complex set of numerous unsolvable equations having open bounds. Even when such a solution would seem feasible, it would often intrigue us with fairly non-trivial questions, such as why does Carbon dioxide gas extinguish fire when its constituting entities namely, oxygen and carbon are combustible. A reductionist approach thus, seems quite improbable to understand nature in its full rigour. One of the directions I would like to explore in the presentation is whether the key to answer such non-trivial questions lies in our holistic understanding of a system and its system-properties. Any system thus, needs to be viewed as a whole entity rather than a combination of parts. But a holistic formulation of the system behaviour places before us challenges in the form of several previously unknown system-properties like adaptivity, self-organization and emergence. Out of these properties, adaptivity and emergence can be viewed as interesting consequences of self-organization, a phenomenon that can be defined as the spontaneous appearance of global coherent pattern due to local interactions. Examples of self-organization in nature are ubiquitous. Thus, self-organization has become essentially an important and an inseparable aspect of myriad processes occurring in nature. Also, during the course of this presentation we will try to understand the drive, the physical motivation behind the process of self-organization taking place in a system. Finally, I shall suggest an intriguing hypothesis that the entirety of science that is known to mankind today is held in the beauty of the above definition of self-organization. ------------------------------ Upcoming Seminars *None, wait for the next season! * See also the ECCO/GBI calendar<https://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=azMyN252aWluM2JoMnU3MXY5OGt2ZzliOGdAZ3JvdXAuY2FsZW5kYXIuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbQ> More info about the ECCO seminar program: http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/108 -- Evo Evo Busseniers - Seminar Coordinator ECCO Group (VUB) <http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/1> Email: [email protected] Website: http://vub.academia.edu/EvoBusseniers<http://be.linkedin.com/in/weaver9/>
