Physicists Study Scale Free Behavior

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physics methods that study things like phase transitions and spins and magnets can be used to rigorously understand the behavior of a system. We call it a domain if all the spins are in the same pointing in the same direction, in some region. And you can show mathematically that the distribution of sizes of the domains of spins at the critical temperature is scale free. It looks more or less the same no matter what scale you look at the icing model at. Just like biological systems like the brain, exhibits scale free behavior. The tree of life that you get from evolution exhibit scalefree behavior. Things in the economy, or in politics, or in social networks exhibit scale freebehavior.

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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