Description:

Marcelo Gleiser

Professor of Physics and Astronomy
Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy
Dartmouth College

Emergent Complexity in the Universe: An Information-Entropic Approach

From atoms to stars, physically-bound systems result from the interplay between attractive and repulsive interactions. In this lecture, I will present a new measure of complexity called "Configurational Entropy". Inspired by Shannon's information entropy, I will show how the configurational entropy encodes information about the shape and the stability of various physical objects, and how it can be used as an efficient measure of emerging complexity during nonequilibrium phenomena. Applications will include solitons, compact astrophysical objects, spontaneous symmetry breaking, and inflationary cosmology.