A HUGE field of scientific study: Complex Systems

 The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics has been given to three scientists who work in complex systems science. This has been a rapidly growing field of study ever since computers began to be invented and applied to science research. Many of you may be interested in complexity science, emergent properties of systems, self-organization, and many other pieces of this field - it is fascinating, and complex systems are found in nearly all parts of life! 

A wonderful resource for learning about complex systems science is the series of modules put out on the Systems Innovation YouTube channel. They have a number of learning modules that introduce us to this type of science; check out one of their videos below. 

I recommend checking out the first one defining what a complex system is. One other resource to really learn about and actually work with complex systems computationally, is to use Netlogo (can either download it or run it on the web) and its library of simulations of systems - Netlogo is an agent-based coding platform that is ideal for numerous complex systems problems and simulations! With hundreds of existing programs to run and to modify to make your own while learning how to code, Netlogo is actually used by professors to do computational research!! 

Another wonderful resource is the Santa Fe Institute website. This is a leading research institution dedicated to complex systems science, and there are many resources and publications to see what this type of science and research looks like. 

Nobel Prize Week!! October, 2021

  It is Nobel week! 

Physiology: Two Americans won, David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian, for determining how the body takes physical sensations and turn them into electrochemical signals within the body so the brain can interpret them as changes in temperature and touch. See the announcement and some details here. 

Physics: Three split the Prize for their work in understanding the science behind complex systems. One of the best examples of how others apply their work is in climate science, and how one begins to understand one of the most complex systems there is, global climate, that has countless of thousands of parameters and variables that interact in so many ways. How does one approach complexity? How does one go about trying to calculate and simulate such a system? How can we possibly understand how to take microscopic processes and figure out how those affect a macrocosmic system? Well, the work of Giorgio Parisi (Italy), Syukuro Manabe (Japan/Princeton), and Klaus Hasselmann (Germany) created the means to do this.