Description:

Joel Lebowitz

George William Hill Professor of Mathematics and Physics
Rutgers University

Microscopic Origin of Emergent Collective Behavior of Macroscopic Systems 

I will describe how statistical mechanics successfully explains many qualitative features of the time evolution of macroscopic systems, such as the approach to equilibrium. This requires essentially only the fact that a macroscopic system has a very large number of microscopic constituents. To obtain more quantitative information about the time evolution requires derivation of autonomous macroscopic equations. This is currently only possible for systems evolving according to stochastic dynamics which (hopefully) mimic the realistic chaotic dynamics. Examples of such models, as well as other models with stochastic evolutions, which are of independent interest (e.g., the Toom model) will be discussed.

Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, Complex Systems