Self-organization in physics

There are several broad classes of physical processes that can be described as self-organization. Such examples from physics include:

structural (order-disorder, first-order) phase transitions, and spontaneous symmetry breaking such as o spontaneous magnetization, crystallization (see crystal growth, and liquid crystal) in the classical domain and o the laser, superconductivity and Bose-Einstein condensation, in the quantum domain (but with macroscopic manifestations) second-order phase transitions, associated with "critical points" at which the system exhibits scale-invariant structures. Examples of these include: o critical opalescence of fluids at the critical point o percolation in random media structure formation in thermodynamic systems away from equilibrium. The theory of dissipative structures of Prigogine and Hermann Haken's Synergetics were developed to unify the understanding of these phenomena, which include lasers, turbulence and convective instabilities (e.g., Bnard cells) in fluid dynamics, o structure formation in astrophysics and cosmology (including star formation, planetary systems formation, galaxy formation) o self-similar expansion o Diffusion-limited aggregation o percolation o reaction-diffusion systems, such as Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction self-organizing dynamical systems: complex systems made up of small, simple units connected to each other usually exhibit self-organization o Self-organized criticality (SOC) In spin foam system and loop quantum gravity that was proposed by Lee Smolin. The main idea is that the evolution of space in time should be robust in general. Any finetuning of cosmological parameters weaken the independency of the fundamental theory. Philosophically, it can be assumed that in the early time, there has not been any agent to tune the cosmological parameters. Smolin and his colleagues in a series of works show that, based on the loop quantization of spacetime, in the very early time, a simple evolutionary model (similar to the sand pile model) behaves as a power law distribution on both the size and area of avalanche. o Although, this model, which is restricted only on the frozen spin networks, exhibits a non-stationary expansion of the universe. However, it is the first serious attempt toward the final ambitious goal of determining the cosmic expansion and inflation based on a self-organized criticality theory in which the parameters are not tuned, but instead are determined from within the complex system.[3]

[edit] Self-organization vs. entropy

Statistical mechanics informs us that large scale phenomena can be viewed as a large system of small interacting particles, whose processes are assumed consistent with well established mechanical laws such as entropy, i.e., equilibrium thermodynamics. However, following the macroscopic point of view the same physical media can be thought of as continua whose properties of evolution are given by phenomenological laws between directly measurable quantities on our scale, such as, for example, the pressure, the temperature, or the concentrations of the different components of the media. The macroscopic perspective is of interest because of its greater simplicity of formalism and because it is often the only view practicable. Against this background, Glansdorff and Ilya Prigogine introduced a deeper view at the microscopic level, where the principles of thermodynamics explicitly make apparent the concept of irreversibility and along with it the concept of dissipation and temporal orientation which were ignored by classical (or quantum) dynamics, where the time appears as a simple parameter and the trajectories are entirely reversible.[4] As a result, processes considered part of thermodynamically open systems, such as biological processes that are constantly receiving, transforming and dissipating chemical energy (and even the earth itself which is constantly receiving and dissipating solar energy), can and do exhibit properties of self organization far from thermodynamic equilibrium. A laser can also be characterized as a self organized system to the extent that normal states of thermal equilibrium characterized by electromagnetic energy absorption are stimulated out of equilibrium in a reverse of the absorption process. If the matter can be forced out of thermal equilibrium to a sufficient degree, so that the upper state has a higher population than the lower state (population inversion), then more stimulated emission than absorption occurs, leading to coherent growth (amplification or gain) of the electromagnetic wave at the transition frequency.[5]