Stability has very different meanings in different sciences and different contexts. Resilience is something, here we're getting closer to what I've been talking about. It's the ability of a system to come back to a state that it was in before the perturbation happened. So you take out these thousand porches of an ancolony. There will be enough forages again for the ancolony to continue.
In our last episode with Tyler Marghetis, we learnt about how a complex system can tip from one state into another. But what happens when systems don't tip or fail? What makes a system robust?
In today's episode, we're talking with Karoline Wiesner, a Professor of Complexity Science in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Potsdam, Germany. She breaks down the characteristics of a robust system, through the context of an incredibly robust complex system — the ant colony.
Connect:
This show is produced in collaboration with Wavelength Creative. Visit wavelengthcreative.com for more information.