The Role of Disorder in Complex Systems

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In the absence of disorder, you essentially just get locked into how things work. And that's why we put disorder here as a necessary condition for structure to arise. On its own, it wouldn't be enough. The next one on the list will be feedback. So the disorder only in tandem with feedback is going to lead to order.

In most of our episodes so far, we've taken a single concept and looked at it through the context of a single example. But in this episode and the next, we're going to pull back the camera to get a bird's-eye view of complexity science, by exploring the features common to all complex systems.

We're joined again by Karoline Wiesner, Professor of Complexity Science in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Potsdam in Germany. In this episode, Karoline is going to explain four conditions that we see in complexity science: numerosity, disorder and diversity, feedback, and non-equilibrium. At the end of the episode, she's going to bring them all together to explain a central concept of complex systems: emergence.

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