Scale Free Behaviour in Nature

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Is it really true that there was nothing tuned in there or in it's not really understood? Let me give you an example of how you can fool yourself into ting t there was no tuning. So many years agomaybemaybe 20 or 30 years ago, a people yoare led bypback made models of sand piles. And what had happened was that, in making the models, people had neglected the inertia of the grains. This is scale free behaviour yr you are talking about. We know that we can easily fool ourselves into thinking that there is a self organization that really not theirs. Is just an artifactor.

Physics is extremely good at describing simple systems with relatively few moving parts. Sadly, the world is not like that; many phenomena of interest are complex, with multiple interacting parts and interesting things happening at multiple scales of length and time. One area where the techniques of physics overlap with the multi-scale property of complex systems is in the study of phase transitions, when a composite system transitions from one phase to another. Nigel Goldenfeld has made important contributions to the study of phase transitions in their own right (and mathematical techniques for dealing with them), and has also been successful at leveraging that understanding to study biological systems, from the genetic code to the tree of life.

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Nigel Goldenfeld received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge. He currently holds the Chancellor's Distinguished Professorship in Physics at UC San Diego. Until recently he was a Swanlund Endowed Chair and Center for Advanced Study Professor in Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Among his awards are the Xerox Award for research, the A. Nordsieck award for excellence in graduate teaching, and the American Physical Society’s Leo P. Kadanoff Prize. He is the co-founder of NumeriX, a company that specializes in high-performance software for the derivatives marketplace.

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