Abstract
This paper is a brief summary of a talk that was designed to address the question of whether two of the pillars of the field of phase transitions and critical phenomena - scale invariance and universality - can be useful in guiding research on a broad class of complex phenomena. We shall see that while scale invariance has been tested for many years, universality is relatively more rarely discussed. In particular, we shall develop a heuristic argument that serves to make more plausible the universality hypothesis in both thermal critical phenomena and percolation phenomena, and suggest that this argument could be developed into a possible coherent approach to understanding the ubiquity of scale invariance and universality in a wide range of complex systems.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 60-68 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications |
| Volume | 281 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jun 15 2000 |
| Event | 5th Taiwan International Symposium on Statistical Physics (StatPhys-Taiwan-1999) - Taipei, Taiwan Duration: Aug 9 1999 → Aug 12 1999 |
Funding
We conclude by thanking all our collaborators and colleagues from whom we learned a great deal. These include the researchers and faculty visitors to our research group with whom we have enjoyed the pleasure of scientific collaboration. Those whose research provided the basis of this lecture summary include, in addition to the co-authors, S.V. Buldyrev, D. Canning, P. Cizeau, X. Gabaix, A.L. Goldberger, S. Havlin, R.N. Mantegna, C.-K. Peng, M.A. Salinger, and M.H.R. Stanley. This work was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation and by the NIH/National Center for Research Resources (grant P41 13622).
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Statistical and Nonlinear Physics
- Statistics and Probability