Condensed concepts

 A characteristic of emergent phenomena is how novel and complex properties can emerge from apparently simple laws. Quantum ChromoDynamics (...

Topology is the field of mathematics describing the properties of geometric objects that do not change when they are smoothly deformed. Thes...

Every person is unique. No two people are identical. We differ in physical appearance, personality, fingerprints, heartbeat, gait, and DNA. ...

Adventures in Flatland In everyday life we think of most objects as having three dimensions. But what would life be like in a two-dimen...

  The order of things Life and the world around us sometimes appears chaotic and random. We may feel this way about traffic, weather, econom...

 Snowflakes form incredibly diverse structures, seen when they condense onto a plate of glass. Every snowflake is different. On the other ha...

In 1986, Steven Weinberg published an article,  Superconductivity for Particular Theorists , in which he stated "No one did more than N...

I just posted on the arXiv a long review article on emergence Emergence: from physics to biology, sociology, and computer science The abstra...

Two years ago, I wrote a post about a paper by Wei et al,  Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models Then last year, I posted about a pap...

Superconductivity beautifully illustrates the characteristics of emergent properties. Novelty.  Distinct properties of the superconducting s...

 The quantum theory of solids developed in the 1920s provided a theoretical estimate of the ideal strength of crystals. The problem was that...

In the previous post, I considered five different characteristics that are often associated with emergence and classified them as being asso...

There is more to emergence than novel properties, i.e., where a whole system has a property that the individual components of the system do ...

 One of the most important ideas in condensed matter physics is that different states of matter are associated with different symmetries. Th...

Time has a direction. Microscopic equations of motion in classical and quantum mechanics have time-reversible symmetry. But this symmetry is...

 Spontaneous symmetry breaking is a fundamental concept in condensed matter and quantum field theory. Amongst philosophers of science the co...