Notes
Slide Show
Outline
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Self-Organization:
Nature’s Intelligent Design
  • J. C. Sprott
  • Department of Physics
  • University of Wisconsin – Madison
  • (USA)



  • Presented for
  • Wednesday Night @ the Lab
  • in Madison, WI
  • on July 10, 2013
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Self-organized Structures in Nature
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Landscape of Early Southern Wisconsin (USA)
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#2
Stochastic Cellular Automaton Model
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Cellular Automaton
(Voter Model)
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Initial Conditions
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#3
Deterministic Cellular Automaton Model
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Why a deterministic model?
  • Randomness conceals our ignorance
  • Simplicity can produce complexity
  • Chaos requires determinism
  • The rules provide insight
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Deterministic CA
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Power Laws (Zipf)
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Other Examples of Power Laws
  • Populations of cities
  • Size of moon craters
  • Size of solar flares
  • Size of computer files
  • Casualties in wars
  • Occurrence of personal names
  • Number of papers scientists write
  • Number of citations received
  • Sales of books, music, …
  • Individual wealth, personal income
  • Many others …
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#4
Lotka-Volterra Models
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Minimal High-D Chaotic L-V Model
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Chaos
  • Chaos is the unpredictable behavior of deterministic systems
  • It is sensitive to initial conditions (the “butterfly effect”)
  • It produces erratic fluctuations and never repeats
  • Systems that produce fractal spatial patterns usually exhibit temporal chaos
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#5
Social Network Model
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Social Networks
  • You tend to befriend friends of your friends
  • You tend to mirror others’ friendliness toward you
  • You have a limited capacity for maintaining friendships
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#6
Strange Attractors
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Aesthetic Evaluation
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Conclusions
  • Many simple models exhibit self-organization (the spontaneous development of complex structures).
  • Models with symmetric rules can have highly asymmetric behavior (symmetry breaking).
  • Some effects may not have easily identifiable causes.
  • The 2nd law of thermodynamics (increasing disorder) is not violated since these systems are far from equilibrium (driven by energy flow).
  • If there is intelligent design in nature, it is at a more fundamental level (the underlying laws of nature) than its proponents commonly suppose.
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References
  • http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/ lectures/selforg.ppt (this talk)
  • http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/
    • chaostsa/ (my book on Chaos)
  • sprott@physics.wisc.edu (contact me)