More than the Sum of the Parts Complexity in Physics and Beyond

by Satz, Helmut

• ISBN13: 9780192864178
• ISBN10: 0192864173
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2022-08-25
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

From physics to information theory and cosmology, from the structure of animal societies to the linguistic analysis of human writing, systems consisting of many interacting constituents often show a collective behaviour not predictable from the interaction of the individual constituents. In More than the Sum of the Parts, Helmut Satz addresses different forms of this complex behaviour, which have been thoroughly investigated only in the past decades. Although these studies originate in physics, the behaviour is found to be universal, ranging from the structure of the early universe to the formation of flocks of birds, and to the frequency of words in literary texts. Complexity is thus becoming an increasingly important interdisciplinary field for future scientific research.

In a conceptual and non-technical way, Satz opens up this exciting field for a general readership and those studying any field of the natural sciences.

Author Biography

Helmut Satz, Emeritus Professor, University of Bielefeld

Helmut Satz is Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics at the University of Bielefield in Germany and has been with the university since 1971. From 1989-1996, he was Staff Member, European Center for Nuclear Research CERN, Geneva. During his career he has been the author of around 250 scientific
papers and books, his most recent being The Rules of the Flock: Self-Organization and Swarm Structure in Animal Societies.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Introduction
2. The Flow of Time
3. Global Connections
4. The Nature of Forces
5. The Formation of Structure
6. The Energy of Space
7. Critical Behavior
8. Self-Organized Criticality
9. Fractal Dimensions
10. Bifurcation and Chaos
11. Brownian Motion
12. Turbulence and Convection
13. Intermittency
14. Words and Numbers
15. Quantum Complexity
17. Conclusions