> > On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 4:44 PM, Russ Abbott <russ.abb...@gmail.com>wrote: >
> An interesting example to which this approach might be applied is an ideal >> gas. Such a gas satisfies all the aggregativity conditions. Yet it has >> properties (the gas laws) that the individual components lack. > > I read this better the second time through. The gas laws are pretty well explained by the kinetic theory - that the gas is composed of atoms which have mass and velocity and the atom kinetic energies follow Boltzmann's distribution. I suppose that one might call the Boltzmann distribution an emergent, but once one has any collection of individuals which have individual properties, one gets a distribution that describes the property in the collection, so it's a pretty low surprise emergent. Now, there was an interesting paper in arxiv.org about systematic coarse graining of molecular dynamics simulations to compute non-equilibrium thermodynamic properties, http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.1467, which had some bearing on this, -- rec --
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
