โ Scribed by Paolo Grigolini; Patti Hamilton; Jim Roberts; Bruce J. West
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The Workshop was both stimulating and fruitful, producing some major results. First of all, a philosophical debate made evident that the field of Complexity might establish a satisfactory connection between thermodynamics and quantum mechanics, through the foundation of a new physics. This is part of a program actively advocated by Professor El Naschie, the Editor in Chief of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals. This journal is hosting an increasing number of foundational papers, in which randomness is the departure point rather than the subjective consequence of a coarsegraining vision of unitary transformations with no room for objective randomness and irreversibility. See Ref.
[1] for a recent review of the approach. The second result has been that the joint actions of randomness and order, when departing from the conditions of ordinary statistical mechanics, generate a process of transition from dynamics to thermodynamics, essentially lasting forever. This synthesis of randomness and order implies the existence of a new state of nature, intermediate between the dynamic and the thermodynamic state. This new state has been called the living state of matter (LSM) and the Workshop discussions led the participants to conclude that the LSM picture provides a new vision of complexity. Finally, from the LSM perspective some very efficient techniques of analysis of time series emerged, which, among other applications, seem to afford powerful tools for the war against terrorism. A round table, which was open to the public, The Scientist as a New Patriot, was devoted to this important issue.
The first paper of these Proceedings, Analysis and its Discontents: Non-linearity and the Way Things Aren't, by P. Gunter, is a philosopher's discussion, clearly expressing the needs for research work in the same directions as those outlined in Ref. [1]. This paper, in addition to the issues raised in Ref. [1], challenges the non-linear science to account for the emergence of life in nature. Some of the challenges of this paper are addressed in the second paper, From Knowledge, Knowability and the Search for Objective Randomness to a New Vision of Complexity, by P. Allegrini et al. This paper is a report of a search for a useful and proper definition of Complexity. The authors of this essay find that entropy, suggested by many scientists as a plausible measure of complexity, rather than the indicator of, possibly anomalous, thermodynamics, turns out to be the harbinger of a condition of transition from dynamics to thermodynamics. They reach this conclusion after establishing that the sources of randomness in traditional physics are actually the channel for the amplification of genuine randomness. If this amplification process takes place in a condition where the renormalization group applies, then the system manifests LSM properties, rather than undergoing a rapid transition from dynamics to thermodynamics. The importance of renormalization group theory for the foundation of this vision of complexity emerges from the third paper, Comments on the Renormalization Group, Scaling and Measures of Complexity, by B. J. West. Some effort in this paper is also made to indicate the ubiquity of the renormalization approach in the physical, social and life sciences. The fourth paper, Complexity in the Experimental Audio/Visual Arts, by P. Winsor, addresses the fascinating problem of Complexity and Art. It would be very exciting to do further research work to establish the connection between Winsor's vision of art and the LSM. In a recent paper [2] El Naschie addresses the interesting issue of measuring the temperature of a drawing by Picasso, and writes: ''The preceding analysis shows that one can feel the temperature of the geometry of a picture. In this sense geometry is far from being static, cold and dead. It is, metaphorically speaking, warm and alive.'' Does the LSM afford a criterion to move from the art of Picasso to the fractal sound pictures of Phil Winsor? The biological relevance of LSM becomes clear in the fifth paper: Towards a characterization of the living state of matter by Marco Buiatti and Marcello Buiatti, who are in fact the scientists who coined the term, Living State of Matter.
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