How do life, economy and other complex systems escape the heat death?
Por Camilo Arcaya • 6 feb, 2014 • Category: OpinionThe primordial confrontation underlying the existence of our universe can be conceived as the battle between entropy and complexity. The law of ever-increasing entropy (Boltzmann H-theorem) evokes an irreversible, one-directional evolution (or rather involution) going uniformly and monotonically from birth to death. Since the 19th century, this concept is one of the cornerstones and in the same time puzzles of statistical mechanics. On the other hand, there is the empirical experience where one witnesses the emergence, growth and diversification of new self-organized objects with ever-increasing complexity. When modeling them in terms of simple discrete elements one finds that the emergence of collective complex adaptive objects is a rather generic phenomenon governed by a new type of laws. These ‘emergence’ laws, not connected directly with the fundamental laws of the physical reality, nor acting ‘in addition’ to them but acting through them were called by Phil Anderson ‘More is Different’, ‘das Maass’ by Hegel etc