Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Fluctuations and Order: The New Synthesis

Fluctuations and Order: The New Synthesis

Millonas, Mark

Paperback

Series: Institute for Nonlinear Science

Technology & EngineeringGeneral GardeningPhysics

ISBN10: 1461284635
ISBN13: 9781461284635
Publisher: Springer Nature
Published: Sep 17 2011
Pages: 456
Weight: 1.47
Height: 0.97 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English
The volume that you have before you is the result of a growing realization that fluctuations in nonequilibrium systems playa much more important role than was 1 first believed. It has become clear that in nonequilibrium systems noise plays an active, one might even say a creative, role in processes involving self-organization, pattern formation, and coherence, as well as in biological information processing, energy transduction, and functionality. Now is not the time for a comprehensive summary of these new ideas, and I am certainly not the person to attempt such a thing. Rather, this short introductory essay (and the book as a whole) is an attempt to describe where we are at present and how the viewpoint that has evolved in the last decade or so differs from those of past decades. Fluctuations arise either because of the coupling of a particular system to an ex- ternal unknown or unknowable system or because the particular description we are using is only a coarse-grained description which on some level is an approxima- tion. We describe the unpredictable and random deviations from our deterministic equations of motion as noise or fluctuations. A nonequilibrium system is one in which there is a net flow of energy. There are, as I see it, four basic levels of sophistication, or paradigms, con- cerning fluctuations in nature. At the lowest level of sophistication, there is an implicit assumption that noise is negligible: the deterministic paradigm.

1 different editions

Also available

Also in

General Gardening

View All