Self-organization:
Nature’s
Intelligent Design
| J. C. Sprott | |
| Department of Physics | |
| University of Wisconsin - Madison | |
| Presented at the | |
| UW Faculty Coterie | |
| On December 14, 2004 |
Self-organized Structures in Nature
Landscape of Early Southern Wisconsin (USA)
#2
Stochastic Cellular Automaton Model
Cellular Automaton
(Voter
Model)
#3
Deterministic Cellular Automaton Model
| Randomness conceals our ignorance | |
| Simplicity can produce complexity | |
| Chaos requires determinism | |
| The rules provide insight |
| 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 citation received | |
| Sales of books, music, … | |
| Individual wealth, personal income | |
| Many others … |
Multispecies Lotka-Volterra Model
Evolution to
“the Edge of 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 |
Minimal High-D Chaotic L-V Model
| You tend to befriend friends of your friends | |
| You tend to mirror others’ friendliness toward you | |
| You have a limited capacity for maintaining friendships |
| Many simple models exhibit self-organization (the spontaneous development of complex structures). | |
| 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. |
| 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) | ||