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MIAPbP

MIAPbP

Boltzmannstr. 2 85748 Garching
Description

Isolated systems tend to evolve towards thermal equilibrium, a special state that has been a research focus in physics for more than a century. By contrast, most processes studied in ORIGINS are far from equilibrium. A fundamental, overarching feature of all these processes is the emergence of structure, order, and information, or in short self-organization. If one wants to understand such physical phenomena from the molecular to the galactic scale, one has to face the challenge of investigating systems where different physics and a multitude of scales are strongly interlinked. There is a need for a holistic approach that combines expertise ranging from theories of the universe to non-equilibrium physics and theories of complex living systems. Such different fields can be interconnected conceptually and mathematically , e.g., by defining collective states of matter to reduce the physics to the most relevant degrees of freedom. While the particular โ€œlanguageโ€ in the various disciplines may differ, we all share the common challenge to understand how the collective interaction between building blocks leads to system-level properties. 

Key questions, that will be addressed during the workshop:

- Is turbulence really self-organisation or "just a pain in the neck"?

- Can we / should we define self-organisation?

- Is there something like "hierarchical self-organisation" which links scales but at each scale there is some self-organisation?

- How important are non-equilbrium processes in self-organisation? What kind of non-equilibrium processes are important?

- Does the scale matter in self-organisation or is it all the same?