Recent Additions: New and Updated Entries in the Past 60 Days
Displaying entries 1 through 15 of 70 found.

Chen, Lei, et al. Metallic Quantum Criticality Enabled by Flat Bands in a Kagome Lattice. arXiv:2307.09431.. As the quotes convey, Rice University Center for Quantum Materials, Vienna University of Technology and SUNY Stony Brook physicists including Jennifer Cano and Silke Paschen delve deeply into these substantial realms and scientific features to reveal still another exemplary statement of nature’s optimum self-organized balance. See also Quantum Criticality Enabled by Intertwined Degrees of Freedom by this group for a broader version in PNAS. (120/30, 2023.)

Strange metals arise in a variety of platforms for strongly correlated electrons, ranging from the cuprates, heavy fermions to flat band systems. We study a Hubbard model on a kagome lattice so as to construct a Kondo lattice description. We identify a Mott transition with a quantum critical point at which quasiparticles a strange metallicity emerges. Our theoretical work opens up a new route for realizing beyond-Landau quantum criticality and novel quantum phases that it nucleates. (Excerpts)

For the first time, we have theoretically realized a metallic quantum critical point enabled by the flat bands of a kagome lattice, with properties that parallel the well established strange metallicity of heavy fermion systems. (28) Our findings also reveal new interconnections among a variety of correlated electron platforms, and point to new platforms for beyond-Landau quantum criticality. (30)

Guan, Shaohua. Universal scaling relation and criticality in bacterial metabolism and growth. arXiv:2308.04776. Four Chinese Academy of Sciences system theorists deftly apply the latest criticality findings so to perceive their optimum invariant occasion across life's earlier phases. Into mid 2923, the evidence grows broadly stronger by the weekly postings

The metabolic network plays a crucial role in regulating bacterial metabolism and growth, but it is subject to inherent molecular stochasticity. In this study, we employ a maximum entropy approach to investigate the universality in various constraint-based metabolic networks of Escherichia coli. Our findings reveal the existence of universal scaling relations across different nutritional environments and metabolic network models, similar to the universality observed in physics. By analyzing single-cell data, we confirm that bacterial metabolism operates close to the state with maximum Fisher information, which serves as a signature of criticality. This critical state provides functional advantages such as high sensitivity and long-range correlation. Moreover, we demonstrate that a metabolic system operating at criticality achieves an optimal balance between growth and adaptation, thereby serving as a survival strategy in fluctuating environments. (Abstract)

Li, Xiu-Juan and Yu-Peng Yang. Signatures of the Self-organized Criticality Phenomenon in Precursors of Gamma-ray bursts. arXiv:2308.14281. Qufu Normal University and Nanking University astro-cybernetics researchers describe still another instance of nature's common avail of this optimum balance.

Precursors provide important clues to the nature of gamma-ray burst (GRB) central engines and can be used to contain GRB physical processes. In this letter, we study the self-organized criticality in precursors of long GRBs in the third Swift/BAT Catalog. We investigate the differential and cumulative size distributions with the Monte Carlo method. All of the distributions can be well described by power-law models within the physical framework of a self-organized criticality. The results show that both precursors and main bursts can be attributed to an self-organized criticality system.

Our Planatural Edition: A 21st Century PhiloSophia, Earthropo Ecosmic PediaVersion

Sorokin, Pitirim. Social and Cultural Dynamics: A Study of Change in Major Systems of Art, Truth, Ethics, Law and Relationships. London: Routledge, 1985. The Russian American historian (1889 – 1968) was at Harvard University for many years and once president of the American Sociological Assoc. Our entry records an earlier 20th century perception arcing back to Marx, Hegel and beyond of a historic scale and sequence of events and societies. Today, however such an independent model is rejected by academic thought since any deeper, implicate phase exists at all.

Sorokin came to view social and cultural dynamics in terms of three major processes: a major shift of mankind's creative center from Europe to the Pacific; a progressive disintegration of the sensate culture; and finally the first blush of the emergence and growth of a new idealistic sociocultural order. (Wikipedia)

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)

If agency does affect the trajectory of evolution, might it generate directionality to the overall process – giving evolution itself some goal or target? Can the agency of organisms, the objects of selection, produce at least the appearance of agency in evolution itself? In some sense it is uncontroversial that evolution possesses something resembling goals, for we see it in persistent convergence, where evolutionary lineages find their way to the same attractor states created by the environment along with the principles of physical law. By the same token, might the operation of agency conceivably create evolutionary attractors shaped by the internal nature of evolution itself? These are open questions. (28)

There is a strong case for considering agency to be a real property of most living organisms, and perhaps as a defining feature of life on a par with metabolism and self-replication. Yet if this is so, it remains unclear how it is to be defined and identified so that researchers can formulate and answer questions about living systems that cannot be addressed mechanistic approach like cognition and consciousness, it is probably not some single essence that living things contain in different amounts. (33)

Fabbro, Franco. Biological and Neuroscientific Foundations of Philosophy. London: Routledge, 2023. Into this year it seems a sage polyscholar is able to contribute his opus work as a whole scale course from matter, energy, space and time across Earth life’s evolutionary emergence all the way to our planetary intelligence. Chapters flow from Philutsophical Foundations of Science and the Origin of Knowledge to the Evolutionary History of Human Beings, Communication and Information, onto DNA as a Symbolic Domain of Life, and Psyche as a Domain of Imagination, and Language as Symbolic Sharing. With this current vantage, the author traces a central course as an increase in informational knowledge and relative literacy which then engenders more personal agency and shared imagination. Altogether the volume exemplifies an participatory perception that may just now be possible.

Written by an expert scholar, the book draws together different strands to explore how scientific and neuropsychological discoveries are vital to our understanding of mind. A philosophical paradigm moves beyond physics and mathematics to embrace more complex frames of the knowledge of psychology and biology. The work reflects on the symbolic dimensions of "information" that characterize DNA genetics and the linguistic psyche involved with cognitive sociality, communication and consciousness. (Publisher)


It has been said that all living organisms from bacteria to human beings that the genetic information is contained in the DNA, which is made up of two strands of nucleotides that wind in a helix around each other. It is possible to compare the sequence of nucleotides bases to the letters of the alphabet that follow one another in ordered combinations to form the words, phrased and chapters of a book. (116)

The genetic code represents a “symbolic order” of a fundamental and universal nature. We speak of “symbols” because the information contained in the DNA is “something that stands for something else.” This is the symbolic order that makes life all living beings possible. The characteristics of universality and indispensability place this order in the innermost of living organisms surrounded in human beings by the most external symbolic layers made up of psyche and language. (117)

Franco Fabbro is Affiliate Professor at the Sant’Anna School of Advances Studies, Pisa. He was full professor of physiology, child neuropsychiatry and clinical psychology at the University of Udine, Italy some thirty years after he graduated in medicine (1982) and specialized in neurology (1986).

Montgomery, Beronda. Following the Principles of the Universe: Lessons from Plants on Individual and Communal Thriving. Integrative and Comparative Biology. August, 2023. Beronda L. Montgomery is Professor of Biology, and Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Grinnell College, Iowa follows up her 2021 book with this title by a further survey of natural wisdom teachings as everything get worse. In regard, we note forester Suzanne Simard who warned of Canadian fires in 2016, and Merlin Sheldrake who writes about fungi webworks (search each). Please also refer to the ubuntu Universe section about an African woman’s wisdom.

The means by which planets and exist in and respond to dynamic environments to thrive as individuals and in communities can provide lessons for humans on sustainable and resilient abide. As a follow up to my 2021 book, Lessons from Plants (Harvard UP), I consider how insights gathered from plant physiology, phenotypic plasticity, and plant growth vitalities can help us improve our lives and our society. Plants are even capable of transformative behaviors so aa to boost their chances of survival, while modifying environs in which they abide. These lessons focus on how plants achieve their own purposes by following common lively principles of the natural universe. (Excerpt)

The ways in which organisms sense and respond to environments to tune their physiologies, metabolisms, and behaviors to external cues can be observed across the biological spectrum. Lessons focusing on how plants respond and acclimate to light and nutrients, engage in symbiotic relationships to avail nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and benefit from the perspectives of groundskeepers are examples of the supportive principles of the universe. Humans often opt of such ways of sustainability and reciprocity, which leave us bereft to climate change and species extinction. We would do well to look to other organisms, such as plants, for inspiration to promote our individual and communal successes in our generation and beyond. (Conclusion)

Musser, George. Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation: Why Physicists are Studying Human Consciousness and AI to Unravel the Mysteries of the Universe.. London: Macmillan, 2023. We first note this November volume by the Scientific American contributor which seems in this year on the verge of a grand synthesis. See also An AI Mystery in the SA and The Biologist Blowing Our Mind in Nautilus (June 18, 2023) about Michael Levin's work (search) on life’s constant poise between defect or cooperate.

For centuries, physicists believed that our notices were faithful representations of what is out there. But when they began to study the subatomic realm, along with cosmology, our view of the universe is became distorted by observation bias. And so today theorists must first explain consciousness.

Neuroscientists have built up an understanding of the structure of the brain. Could this help physicists understand the levels of self-organization they observe in other systems? Exploring these questions and more, George Musser tackles these deep interconnections between quantum mechanics, cosmology, and human consciousness. By way of portraits of frontier thinkers, the work shows how theories of everything depend on theories of mind—and how they might be one and the same.

Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Actual Factual Knowledge

Blumenberg, Hans. Readability of the World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022. This especial volume ha been translated some forty years later to make it available when we need its unique contribution. A leading philosopher and historian of his day, Blumenberg was not postmodem or polemic but laid out his own "Metaphorology" view of an analogic affinity amongst everything, Here he chose the concept of a deep sense from Greece to 20th century genetics of how natural existence could be appreciated to have a literate, textual book-like essence.

The Readability of the World (c. 1980) represents Hans Blumenberg's main articulation of his analogic philosophy first cited (c. 1960) in Paradigms for a Metaphorology. In his view such patterns of thought and feeling have a fluid form as they serve a vital purpose tp allow peoples to orient themselves in an overwhelming world. As an exemplary instance, the author chooses the historic concept of an extant world with a literate-like identity. The metaphor of the book of nature has been central to Western interpretations of reality, and Blumenberg traces its course from ancient Greek cosmology to a latest 20th century version as a DNA genetic code. In an anthropological mode, many longings to contain all of nature, history, and reality in an intelligible way such as the Bible, the Talmud, and the Qur'an to Diderot's Encyclopedia and Humboldt's Cosmos to ACGT nucleotides are covered..

Hans Blumenberg (1920–1996) was an important European philosopher of his day who avoided both postmodern and polemical modes. He was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Münster and wrote The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, The Genesis of the Copernican World, (search) and more. His thoughtful contributions are only now being translated, when we most need them.

Popova, Maria. The Mirror of Enigmas: Chance, the Universe, and the Fragile Loveliness of Knowing Who We Are. themarginalia.org. June 21, 2021. We cite this entry by the Bulgarian-American essayist to give notice to her wise woman, deeply insightful writings in this online magazine. See also Maria's own website, Wikipedia page, a 2019 book, and TED talk for an array of feminine, double dimension, hopeful imaginations. It also reminds of Jorge Borges' universal textual essence. But we placed within World Philosophy as a luminous version of what must compose a true bicameral, familial integrity if we are ever to move from war to an Earthropocene sustainability.

Titling the essay (The Mirror of Enigmas) after St. Paul’s cryptic statement Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate — We now see through a mirror — Borges considers the tribe of thinkers who have perched their efforts to reconcile knowledge and mystery, the scientific and the spiritual, on the assumption that “the history of the universe — and in it the most tenuous detail of our lives — has an incalculable, symbolical value.” With his poetic precision, he condenses this common hypothesis:

The outer world — forms, temperatures, the moon — is a language humans have forgotten or which we can scarcely distinguish.

Salom, Igor. 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics and the End of Mechanistic Materialism. arXiv:2308.12297. An Institute of Physics, Group for Gravitation, Particles and Fields, Belgrade researcher provides an insightful observation of this present historic cosmicview shift just going on in our global midst. See his web page and this eprint site for much collegial work. As the Whole World Philosophy section may evoke, a deep sapient insistence to explore and a fantastic universe and human abide seems to occur wherever it can. Into these late 2020s might a revolutionary EarthKinder version be possible to salve, save and begin a new Light age.

The ideas and results that are in the background of the 2022 Nobel Prize in physics had an immense impact on our understanding of reality. Therefore, it is crucial that these implications reach also the general public, not only the scientists in the related fields of quantum mechanics. The purpose of this review is to attempt to elucidate these revolutionary changes in our worldview that were eventually acknowledged also by the Nobel's committee. As we will see, the standard mechanist picture of the universe is no longer a viable option, and can be never again. Nowadays, we know this with certainty unusual for physics, that only a strict mathematical theorem could provide. (Excerpt)

Han, Barbara, et al. A synergistic future for AI and ecology.. PNAS Nexus. 120/38, 2023. Into the 2020s Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Millbrook, NY, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University and U.S. Geological Survey (Jacob Zwart) suggest it is time for a novel confluence going forward between these fields since both have affinities to neural network forms and phenomena.

Research in both ecology and AI strives for predictive understanding of complex systems, where nonlinearities arise from entity interactions and feedbacks across multiple scales. After a century of advances in computational and ecological research, we foresee a need for intentional synergies to meet many societal challenges of global change. Persistent epistemic barriers would benefit from attention in both disciplines. The implications of a successful convergence go beyond advancing ecological disciplines or achieving an artificial general intelligence are critical for both persisting and thriving in an uncertain future. (Excerpt}

Leung, Henry and Jo Bovy. Towards an astronomical foundation model for stars with a Transformer-based model. arXiv:2308.10944. As the quote notes, University of Toronto astronomers describe an integral method by which to readily join and enhance vast data surveys as a large language document (parsing the parsecs?). Here more evidence of an historic turn to a global phase which could be seen as learning on her/his own. And once more an allusion to a natural textuality is suggested.

Rapid strides are currently being made in the field of artificial intelligence using Transformer-based models like Large Language Models (LLMs). The potential of these methods for creating a single, large, versatile model in astronomy has not yet been explored. In this work, we propose a framework for data-driven astronomy that uses the same core techniques and architecture as used by LLMs. Using a variety of observations and labels of stars as an example, we build a Transformer-based model and train it in a self-supervised manner with cross-survey data sets to perform a variety of inference tasks.

Truong, Timothy and Tristan Bepler. PoET: A Generative Model of Protein Families as Sequences of Sequences. arXiv:2306.06156. New York Structural Biology Center researchers (search BP) contribute an exemplary review of how current deep computational learning advances can serve to well parse both vital proteins and linguistic prose. In mid 2023, this historic spiral ascent is gaining a wide utility and benefit, see The Future of Fundamental Science Led by Generative Closed-Loop Artificial Intelligence at 2307.07522 for a latest global overview.

For more topical cases see RITA: A Study on Scaling up Generative Protein Sequence Models at 2205.05789, Large Language Models Generate Functional Protein Sequences in Nature Biotechnology (January 2023), AmadeusGPT: A Natural Language Interface for Interactive Animal Behavior (2307.04858) and Generative Language Models on Nucleotide Sequences of Human Genes (2307.10634).

Generative protein language models are a natural way to design biomolecules with new desired functions. However, current versions are difficult to produce, or need be trained on a multiple sequence alignment (MSA). To address this, we propose Protein Evolutionary Transformer (PoET), an autoregressive model of whole protein families that can generate sets of related proteins as sequences-of-sequences across millions of natural protein clusters. But PoET can be a retrieval-augmented model to score modifications on any protein family, and generalize even for small families. This is enabled by a unique Transformer layer; we model tokens sequentially within sequences while attending between sequences order invariantly, allowing PoET to scale to context lengths beyond those used during training. (Excerpt)

Proteins are large, complex molecules that play many critical roles in the body. They do most of the work in cells and are required for the structure, function, and regulation of the tissues and organs. Proteins are made up of hundreds or thousands of smaller units called amino acids. The sequence of amino acids determines each protein’s unique 3-dimensional structure and its specific function. (MedlinePlus)

Zenil, Hector, et al. The Future of Fundamental Science Led by Generative Closed-Loop Artificial Intelligence. arXiv:2307.07522. In this year when Earthuman acumen seems in ascent to a computational planetsphere, twenty two senior theorists based at the Alan Turing Institute including Alan Bundy, Carla Gomes and Hiroaki Hirano post a copious document with 125 references so to scope a careful transition across many fields of scientific researches. After a wide and deep survey, vital benefits such as global health wellness and mitigating climate change are cited.

Recent advances in machine learning and AI, including Generative AI and LLMs are disrupting technological innovation, product development, and society as a whole. Yet, AI has contributed less to fundamental science in part because large data sets of high-quality data for scientific practice and model discovery are more difficult to access. Here we explore and investigate aspects of an AI-driven, automated, closed-loop approach to scientific discovery, including self-driven hypothesis generation and open-ended autonomous exploration. Such a vision would push the boundaries of new fundamental science rather than automatize current workflows and instead open doors for technological innovation to tackle some of the greatest challenges facing humanity today. (Excerpt)

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