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I. Planatural Genesis: A Phenomenal, PhiloSophia, Propaedutic, TwinKinder, PersonVerse EndeavorC. Our Earthumanity Glimpses an Animate Family Ecosmos Cocreative MultiUniVerse Aguado, Ramon, et al. When matter and information merge into “Quantum.”. Communications Physics. September 22, 2023. Reviewed more in Mind/Matter, the note announces and surveys a huge global conference held in Madrid which could well stand as a major event and statement of an actual cocreativity this year. Yet we are betwixt past dark and future light ages, it is vital that such an alternative vision become evident. Ahmed, Nafeez. “Planetary phase shift” as a new systems framework to navigate the evolutionary transformation of human civilization. Foresight. November 2024, . In this Emerald Insight journal, a British investigative journalist, author and academic contributes a rare composite, global overview by which to perceive a crucial transitional event. T The paper advances futures study and practice by an example of a unified theoretical framework across a wide range of different ecological, social, political and economic systems. It proposes a new “collective forward intelligence” that can make sense of their trends as symptoms of a wider planetary sphere and to also construct plausible scenarios to underpin national and international decision-making. This study focusses on a transdisciplinary integration of C. S. Holling’s (search) adaptive environmental cycle with phase-transition phenomena across biology, physics and chemistry, applied on societal and civilizational scales. (Abstract) Aschwanden, Martin. Power Laws in Astrophysics: Self-Organized Criticality Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025.. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025. The author has studied observations and theoretical models of self-organized criticality systems for over 40 years as a researcher based at Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory. This latest edition follows his 2011 work Self-Organized Criticality in Astrophysics: Statistics of Nonlinear Processes in the Universe, along with many collegial projects and writings (search) before and after. For recent work see Universal Constants and Energy Integral in Self-Organized Criticality Systems at arXiv:2412.03481 (reviewed) and Testing the Universality of Self-Organized Criticality in Galactic, Extra-Galactic, and Black-Hole Systems at arXiv:2412.03499. Research applications of complex systems and nonlinear physics are rapidly expanding across scientific disciplines. A common theme among them is the concept of “self-organized criticality systems”, which this volume presents for astrophysical phenomena such as solar flares, planetary systems, galactic and black-hole systems. The work explores why do power laws, self-organized criticality, an a universality actually exist? A highlight is a paradigm shift from microscopic concepts, such as cellular automaton algorithms, to macroscopic concepts formulated in terms of physical scaling laws. Azarian, Bobby. The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness and Cosmic Complexity. Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2022. The author is a science journalist with a neuroscience PhD from George Mason University, where he was a member of Harold Morowitz’s discussion group. His acknowledgements close with a quote (see below) from Harold’s The Emergence of Everything (2002) as an early glimpse of an epic 21st century revolution. In this prescient edition, Dr. Azarian provides a rare, insightful, wide-ranging survey to date. Three main sections, Origins, Evolution, and Transcendence, have chapters such as Our Cohesive Cosmic Story, Poetic Meta-Naturalism, the Biosphere is an Autocatalytic Set, Evolution is a Knowledge Creation Process, An Evolutionary Synthesis, A Unifying Theory of Reality and We are a Way for the Cosmos to Know Itself. A central theme is an animate presence of a universal self-organization which proceeds engender fractal-like scales of an emergent intricacy, organic beingness, and cognitive awareness. Here is a good glimpse so far which we seek to report and document. But a work remains to get on with it in this decade. According to the prevailing scientific paradigm, the universe tends toward randomness; it functions according to laws without purpose, and the emergence of life is an accident devoid of meaning. But this bleak interpretation of nature is currently being challenged by novel findings at the intersection of physics, biology, neuroscience, and information theory. Generally known as “complexity science, it has led to new understandings of an oriented, emergent evolution. A revolutionary cosmic narrative is taking shape whereby simplest “parts” come together to form ever-greater “wholes” in a process that has no end in sight. (Publisher) Ball, Philip. Organisms as Agents of Evolution: A New Research Review. templeton.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Biological-Agency_1_FINAL.pdf. The British science polyscholar posts a 40 page contribution in May to a Templeton subject Agency, Directionality and Function: Foundations for a Science of Purpose project. Its description (Google words) notes that into the 2020s, a new theoretic and evidential sense is in ascent, as not before, which views life’s long development from invertebrates to human cognizance as mainly due to innate proactive, self- and group serving behaviors. Short chapters herein include Agency as Autonomy, Thermodynamic Origins, Multicellular Collective Agency and Engineering and Ourselves. As this site records, other versions are autocatalytic, collectively intelligent, autopoietic self-maintenance. For example, prebiotic complexity (Egbert) seems to have its own motives, while a Bayesian theory occurs in physics (Fuchs). See also How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology by PB for his premier volume about life’s self-propelled quickening, cerebral evolution all the way to our observance and record. (November 2023) Agency is the capacity to make goal-directed changes to one’s self and environment – seems to be a real and general characteristic of living organisms. Yet unlike other general features such as replication and metabolism, we lack widely accepted models or theories of what agency is and how it arises. Do modern biology and evolutionary theory need them? If so, what might they look like? (Introduction)
Ball, Philip.
Physicists Rewrite the Fundamental Law that Leads to Disorder.
Quanta.
May 26,
2022.
In this significant article, the British polyscholar science writer surveys a rush of current advances which altogether well imply an historic revision of 19th century thermodynamic theories By a novel inclusion of quantum information qualities, the entropic demise implied by the second law from Ludwig Boltzmann (1877) can be set aside and moved beyond. This wide=ranging entry builds its case by enjoining the thought and writings of key contributors such as Chiara Marletto and David Deutsch (constructor theory), along with Vlatko Vedral, Gilad Gour, Markus Muller and others. The second law of thermodynamics is among the most sacred in all of science, but it has always rested on 19th century arguments about probability. New arguments trace its true source to the flows of quantum information. (Summary)
Bezgodov, Aleksandr and Konstantin Barezhev.
The Origin of Planetary Ethics in the Philosophy of Russian Cosmism.
UK: Xlibris,
2019.
The Russian philosopher authors are General Director and Research Director of the Planetary Development Institute, which is based in Dubai. Into March 2022, it is timely that I came upon this erudite volume based on a deep native wisdom of these Eastern Slavic peoples. From the 1890s to the 1950s, this stellar school conceived an organic, numinous, feminine milieu which requires our human/Earth participation. (See George Young 2010 herein for a historic review.) The epochal endeavor was distinguished by contributors such as Nikolai Federov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Vladimir Vernadsky. Two chapters are Nikolai Umov: Anti-Entropy Ethics for Controlled Evolution and Ivan Efremov: Between Inferno and Harmony. An overall unitary, “panbiologic” animation and procreative destiny was traced from dark to light, relative chaos to order, with a quickening consciousness which peoples would spread across the galaxies. This book seeks to formulate a Planetary Ethics as a moral basis and value code for a biocompatible, harmonious, and manageable civilization. Its essential content is extensively drawn Russian cosmists from the 1890s to the 1950s who made up this unique philosophical, scientific, and cultural phenomenon. By way of their joint planetary-cosmic consciousness, they developed a system of biocentric and humanistic values. Another facet was a spiritual rebellion of life against chaos, death, and limitation. The cosmists focused on a united humanity and a definitive relationship between human beings and a biouniverse still in the making. (Excerpt) Bialek, William. Ambitions for theory in the physics of life. arXiv:2401.15538. The Princeton polyphysicist opens his 2024 entries with a review of 2023 presentations that he made at the Les Houches Summer School in the Swiss Alps (Google for annual programs). Search WB herein and arXiv.com preprint for several collegial contributions. As I gather and record into wider war October, along with other integral postings (Prokopenko, et al), it truly does seem that a revolutionary (family) reunion of universe and humanverse is finally becoming an actual reality. Into 2025 going forward, this is an awesome, historic achievement as our collective pediasphere comes to learn and discover on her/his own. Theoretical physicists have been fascinated by the phenomena of life for more than a century. As we can presently engage more realistic descriptions of living systems, however, things get complicated. After reviewing different reactions to this complexity, I explore the optimization of information flow as a potentially general theoretical principle. The primary example is a genetic network guiding development of the fly embryo, but each idea also is illustrated by examples from neural systems. In each case, optimization makes detailed, largely parameter-free predictions that connect quantitatively with experiment.
Bialek, William.
Bialek, William. Moving boundaries: An appreciation of John Hopfield..
arXiv:2412.18030..
As a junior colleague at Princeton with the new physics laureate for his initial 1982 conception of neural networks, this commentary first reminisces and The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, "for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks." As noted by the Nobel committee, their work moved the boundaries of physics. This is a brief reflection on Hopfield's work, its implications for the emergence of biological physics as a part of physics, the path from his early papers to the modern revolution in artificial intelligence, and prospects for the future. (Abstract) Bowick, Mark, et al. Symmetry, Thermodynamics and Topology in Active Matter. Physical Review X. February, 2022. This is an invited perspective review of a 2020 Kavli Conference with this title by Kavli Institute, UC Santa Barbara, MIT and Indian Institute of Science physicists. Two coauthors are Cristina Marchetti and Sriram Ramaswamy who were the main founders of this scientific notice of how particulate materials (e.g., colloids, bacteria) in both organic and inorganic media tend to self-organize into complex, dynamic forms. As a COVID remote meeting, many more authorities could present their work. Now ten years on, it is strongly evident that a common, robust spontaneity serves to vivify natural phenomena everywhere. The Active Matter phrase refers to any collection of entities that individually use free energy to generate their own motion and forces. Through interactions, active particles spontaneously organize into emergent large-scale structures. This self-organizing paradigm is now applied to living and nonliving systems from subnuclear structures in the cell to collective motion at the human scale. The diverse phenomena they exhibit all stem from a dynamic assembly of discrete components that dissipatively break time-reversal symmetry. Here we review an array of current and emerging research directions as physical materiality, broadly conceived, comes to life. (Abstract, excerpt)
Bruckner, David and Gasper Tkacik.
Bruckner, David and Gasper Tkacik. Information content and optimization of self-organized developmental systems..
PNAS.
121/23,
2024.
Institute of Science and Technology (ITSA), Austria physicists introduce a novel framework to study self-organized, reaction-diffusion patterning as a stochastic dynamical system. As the quotes say, their proof of principle is the way cells form, migrate and combine in. embryonic development. See also then Waves, patterns, bifurcations: the vertebrate segmentation clock by Paul Francois and Victoria Mochulska in Physics Reports (Volume 1080, 2024) and Precise and scalable self-organization in mammalian pseudo-embryos by Melody Merle and Leah Friedman in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. (31/896, 2024) for similar, concurrent reports of the same theoretical basis. Development relies on the ability of cells to self-organize into patterns of different cell types that underlie the formation of tissues and organs. But how to generically quantify the patterning performance of different biological self-organizing systems has remained unclear. Here, we develop an information-theoretic framework to analyze a wide range of models of self-organization. Our approach can be used to define the information content of observed patterns, assess the importance of regulatory motifs, and predict optimal operating regimes for self-organizing systems. In regard, this framework achieves a unifying mathematical language to describe the actual presence of biological self-organization across diverse systems. (Significance)
Canup, Robin and Philip Christensen, Co-Chairs.
Origins, Worlds and Life: A Decadal Strategy for Planetary Science and Astrobiology.
Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences,
2022.
The online posting is a thorough, graphic, 700+ page volume all about this ambitious 2023 to 2032 USA research project, with many global inputs. A paper edition will appear next year. It even considers “Planetary Defense” against astro objects. An Earthuman basis is conveyed by some 600 White Paper topical proposals across a wise span such as A Solar System Space Telescope, New Planetary Data Ecosystems Centers, and Cryogenic Comet Sample Return. Specific chapters cover Evolution of Protoplanetary Disks, Global Atmospheres, Magnetospheres, Moons, and Climate, on to Exoplanets, Dynamic Habitability and Life Elsewhere, along with program plans, equity concerns and so on. Many sections discuss spaceflight missions in this period and beyond STATEMENT OF TASK: The Space Studies Board shall establish a survey committee to develop a comprehensive science and mission strategy for planetary science that updates and extends the Board’s current solar system exploration decadal survey, Vision and Voyages for Planetary Science in the Decade 2013-2022. The new decadal survey shall broadly canvas the field of space and ground-based planetary science to determine the current state of knowledge and identify the most important scientific questions to be addressed during the interval. In addition, it will address relevant programmatic and implementation issues of interest to NASA and the National Science Foundation.
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