<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML xmlns:st1 = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags"><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<META content="MSHTML 6.00.2900.2722" name=GENERATOR></HEAD>
<BODY id=role_body style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: #000000; FONT-FAMILY: Arial"
bottomMargin=7 leftMargin=7 topMargin=7 rightMargin=7><FONT id=role_document
face=Arial color=#000000 size=3>
<DIV>
<DIV>
<DIV>Very good thinking. Below is the basic search pattern that I see in
life forms from bacteria to humans. </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>I have a question. Is this search pattern mirrored in inaminate
evolution--in the 10 billion years of cosmic evolution that occurred before life
began? Is there an anolog or precursor to this pattern in the evolution of
inanimate matter. Howard</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>
<P class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT face="Courier New"
size=2>everyone is insecure.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</SPAN>insecurity is one of the things that keeps us attached to each other and
to society.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Uncertainty and the
nervous sense that we’d better get a quick reality check is one of the prime
movers of the group brain. insecurity is so basic to life that even ants and
bacteria get insecure.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>they need to
rub up against each other for reassurance over and over and over again.<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>chimps too.<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>They dash out of the group for an
adventure, get insecure as hell, dash back, and when they plunge into the warmth
of the crowd and rub up against as many of their sisters or brothers as it takes
to calm them down, they accomplish something more than mere self-comfort.<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>They give a bit of information on the
territory they’ve just explored.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</SPAN>Each does a little antenna-and-scouting work for the crowd.<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Each gets a little from the antenna work
of her insecure sisters who’ve dashed out ebulliently to explore, then have
gotten the shivers and come back to share their experience and get some much
needed warmth.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Even when we move
into strange emotional territory, we need to dash back and share it with a
friend to make sure we’re sane and to get reassurance.<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>In the process we reveal a bit of
emotional exploration to the friend.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes">
</SPAN>Ever wonder about why one of the largest churches in the history of
mankind was able to make such an enormous business out of confession?<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>There are some things so shameful we
can’t even talk about them with our friends.<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>So who’s in the business of listening to
what we don’t dare tell a soul?<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Not
only listening and affirming us, but absolving us to boot?<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Yes, the good
<st1:place><st1:PlaceName>old Catholic</st1:PlaceName>
<st1:PlaceType>Church</st1:PlaceType></st1:place>.<SPAN
style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Our insecurities keep us together as an
information processing engine.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Our
restlessness keeps us going off in new directions so we’ll have something to
share.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>Every time we panic and run
to talk to a friend we are providing new stuff for the data cruncher of society
to munch.<SPAN style="mso-spacerun: yes"> </SPAN>so what's true of chimps
and ants and microbes is gonna be true for you and me.</FONT></P></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>In a message dated 9/2/2005 11:00:57 AM Eastern Standard Time,
obi.fox@gmail.com writes:</DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: blue 2px solid"><FONT
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent" face=Arial color=#000000 size=2>
<DIV>Howl,</DIV>
<DIV>while I fundamentally agree with your position, my present fascination
with the neurophysiology of the biological mechanism leads me to suggest that
it may not be the function of "search" itself which will lead to the answer
you seek - but rather that of the manner in which it is mitigated and modified
by the function of avoidance. As my grandfather (dean of physics at
Columbia for 30 yrs) taught me in my youth - one will never fully understand
the qualities of attraction unless you are able to account for the factor of
repulsion as well. </DIV>
<DIV>When you look at much of the present research in neurophysiology a
pattern begins to appear in which "search" is the primary S/R response of the
biomass. It is a pretty straight-forward, target oriented, response of
distance reduction. The patterns or "strategies" only emerge when you
factor in the manner in which the braking mechanism (avoidance sequences)
operate simultaneously and change/redirect the movement and orientation.
</DIV>
<DIV>The third factor in the equation, which is usually overlooked, is the
role of proximity - particularly in relation to avoidance/repulsion. I
strongly suspect that this combination (repulsion/proximity) is the factor
which Tsallis's equation takes into account. </DIV>
<DIV>As I am not a physicist (just a philosopher with a fascination with the
behavioral mechanism) I can't give you much more than this clue. I am,
however, reasonably sure that it is the critical factor in the movement and
orientation of sentient organisms and strongly suspect it is, as you suggest,
a reflection of the underlying physical laws of the universe. </DIV>
<DIV>cheers</DIV>
<DIV>OBi Fox<BR><BR> </DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=gmail_quote>On 8/31/05, <B class=gmail_sendername><A
title=mailto:HowlBloom@aol.com
href="mailto:HowlBloom@aol.com">HowlBloom@aol.com</A></B> <<A
title=mailto:HowlBloom@aol.com
href="mailto:HowlBloom@aol.com">HowlBloom@aol.com</A>> wrote:</SPAN>
<BLOCKQUOTE class=gmail_quote
style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid"><FONT
face=Arial color=#000000 size=3>
<DIV>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">Pavel, Joel, Paul, and Eshel—</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">See if I've understood the following article
correctly.<SPAN> </SPAN></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">In this cosmos things don't follow the sort
of random spread of probabilities Ludwig Boltzmann believed in.<SPAN>
</SPAN>Instead, old patterns jump from one level to another, showing up in
new news. <SPAN> </SPAN></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">To understand the size and nature of the
jumps, we have to understand something even deeper—the search strategies
with which the cosmos explores what Stuart Kaufman calls "possibility
space". </P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">The key quote from the article below is this
one:<SPAN> </SPAN>"<B><SPAN style="BACKGROUND: yellow">if physicists
can adequately understand the details of this 'exploring behaviour', they
should be able to predict values of q from first principles
</SPAN>".</B></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">Now please bear with me.<SPAN>
</SPAN>What I've been digging into for many decades is the manner in which
the cosmos feels out her possibilities—the search strategies of nature. So
have Eshel Ben-Jacob, Paul Werbos, Pavel Kurakin, and Joel Isaacson.
<SPAN> </SPAN></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">Pavel and I, in our paper "Conversation
(dialog) model of quantum transitions" (arXiv.org) suggest that we may find
applications all up and down the scale of nature to one search strategy in
particular, that used by a cloud of 20,000 smart particles—bees. </P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">Power laws help us move from the human-scale
to the very big.<SPAN> </SPAN>They help us understand how patterns
visible on one scale—the scale of the spiral of water that flushes your
toilet, for example, can be scaled up to hurricanes, to vortex of the Red
Spot on the surface of Jupiter, to hurricanes on Jupiter the size of thirty
earths, and to the spirals of billions of stars called galaxies.
<SPAN> </SPAN>Power laws or their equivalent also allow us to predict
that if we give the cosmos another six or seven billion years, the spirals
from your toilet will show up in swirls of multitudes of galaxies—they will
show up in today's potato-shaped, still-embryonic galaxy clusters.
<SPAN> </SPAN></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">Power laws can be used in forward or
reverse.<SPAN> </SPAN>In addition to going from the small to the very
big, they can help us move from the human-scale to the very
small.<SPAN> </SPAN>Power laws help us understand how the swirl in
your bathtub shows up in the swizzles of electrons twisting through a
channel on a superconductor.<SPAN> </SPAN></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">On the level of life, we can see search
patterns at work, search patterns in Dennis Bray's clusters of receptors on
a cell wall, search patterns in Eshel Ben-Jacobs multi-trillion-member
bacterial colonies, search patterns in Tom Seeley's colonies of bees, search
patterns in E.O. Wilson's colonies of ants, and search patterns in colonies
of termites.<SPAN> </SPAN>We can see search patterns in the motions of
birds, and in the way these patterns have been modeled mathematically in
Floys (mathematically-generated flocks of carnivorous Boids—see <A
title=http://www.aridolan.com/ofiles/JavaFloys.html
onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"
href="http://www.aridolan.com/ofiles/JavaFloys.html"
target=_blank>http://www.aridolan.com/ofiles/JavaFloys.html</A>). We can see
search patterns in Martha Sherwood's vampire bats, and search patterns in
the areas of my fieldwork--human cultural fads and fashions and the
multi-generational search patterns of art, religion, ideology, world-views,
and science. </P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">If search patterns are the key to
understanding the factor q, if they are the key to comprehending the magic
factor that scales things up and down in giant, discontinuous leaps, then
let's by all means take search patterns at the scale of life and apply them
like hell. </P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">That's exactly what Pavel Kurakin and I have
done in our paper.<SPAN> </SPAN>And it's what I've done in much of my
work, including in a book that's been growing in the Bloom computer for
fifteen years-- A Universe In Search Of Herself—The Case of the Curious
Cosmos. </P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">Now the question is this.<SPAN>
</SPAN>Have I misinterpreted the material below?<SPAN> </SPAN>And even
if I've mangled it utterly, could an understanding of search patterns at one
scale in the cosmos echo the patterns at other levels big and small?
<SPAN> </SPAN>If the search patterns of life are reflected in the
inanimate cosmos, do the search patterns of life in turn reflect the search
patterns of the particles and processes of which they are made?<SPAN>
</SPAN>And do the search patterns of an organism reflect the search patterns
of her flock, her tribe, her culture, and of the total team of
biomass?<SPAN> </SPAN></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">To what extent are competing search patterns
a part of the cosmic process?<SPAN> </SPAN>Did competing search
patterns only show up 3.85 billion years ago with the advent of life
(assuming that the advent of life on earth took place at the same time as
the advent of life—if there is any—elsewhere in the universe)? <SPAN>
</SPAN>Are the gaps between competing search patterns also big ones, with
their own chasms and jumps spaced out by their own mysterious q?</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">Biomass has been probing this planet for 3.85
billion years now, and we are the fingers with which she feels out her
possibilities.<SPAN> </SPAN>But we are also the fingers through which
social clusters of protons 13.7 billion years old feel out their
future.<SPAN> </SPAN>Is q related to the discipline of a probing
strategy?</P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> </P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">Retrieved <SPAN>August 31, 2005</SPAN>, from
the World Wide Web<SPAN> </SPAN><A
title=http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg18725141.700
onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"
href="http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg18725141.700"
target=_blank>http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg18725141.700</A>
NewScientist.com<SPAN> </SPAN>* HOME * |NEWS * |EXPLORE BY SUBJECT *
|LAST WORD * |SUBSCRIBE * |SEARCH * |ARCHIVE * |RSS * |JOBS<SPAN>
</SPAN>Click to Print Entropy: The new order <SPAN> </SPAN>* 27 August
2005 * From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues. *
Mark Buchanan<SPAN> </SPAN><B>CONSTANTINO TSALLIS has a single
equation</B> written on the blackboard in his office. It looks like one of
the most famous equations in physics, but look more closely and it's a
little bit different, decorated with some extra symbols and warped into a
peculiar new form. <SPAN> </SPAN>Tsallis, based at the Brazilian
Centre for Research in Physics, Rio de Janeiro, is excited to have created
this new equation. And no wonder: his unassuming arrangement of symbols
<B>has stimulated hundreds of researchers to publish more than a thousand
papers in the past decade, describing strange patterns in fluid flows, in
magnetic fields issuing from the sun and in the subatomic debris created in
particle accelerators. </B>But there is something even more remarkable about
<B>Tsallis's equation: it came to him in a daydream.</B><SPAN>
</SPAN>In 1985, in a classroom in Mexico City, Tsallis was listening as a
colleague explained something to a student. On the chalkboard they had
written a very ordinary algebraic expression, pq, representing some number p
raised to the power q In Tsallis's line of work - describing the collective
properties of large numbers of particles - the letter "p" usually stands for
probability: the probability that a particle will have a particular
velocity, say. Tsallis stared at the formula from a distance and his mind
drifted off. "There were these pqs all over the board," he recalls, "and it
suddenly came to my mind - like a flash - that with powers of probabilities
one might do some unusual but possibly quite interesting physics."
<SPAN> </SPAN>The physics involved may be more than quite interesting,
however. <B>The standard means of describing the collective properties of
large numbers of particles - known as statistical mechanics</B> - has been
hugely successful for more than a century, but it has also been rather
limited in its scope: you can only apply it to a narrow range of systems.
Now, with an insight plucked out of thin air, Tsallis may have changed all
that. <B><SPAN> </SPAN>Developed in the 19th century, statistical
mechanics enabled physicists to overcome an imposing problem. Ordinary
materials such as water, iron or glass are made of myriad atoms. But since
it is impossible to calculate in perfect detail how every individual atom or
molecule will move, it seems as if it might never be possible to understand
the behaviour of such substances at the atomic level. <SPAN>
</SPAN>The solution, as first suggested by the Austrian physicist Ludwig
Boltzmann, lay in giving up hope of perfect understanding and working with
probabilities instead. Boltzmann argued that knowing the probabilities for
the particles to be in any of their various possible configurations would
enable someone to work out the overall properties of the system. Going one
step further, he also made a bold and insightful guess about these
probabilities - that any of the many conceivable configurations for the
particles would be equally probable. </B>Deeper beauty<SPAN>
</SPAN>Boltzmann's idea works, and has enabled physicists to make
mathematical models of thousands of real materials, from simple crystals to
superconductors. But his work also has a deeper beauty. For a start, it
reflects the fact that many quantities in nature - such as the velocities of
molecules in a gas - follow "normal" statistics. That is, they are closely
grouped around the average value, with a "bell curve" distribution.
<SPAN> </SPAN><B>The theory also explains why, if left to their own
devices, systems tend to get disorganised. Boltzmann argued that any system
that can be in several different configurations is most likely to be in the
more spread out and disorganised condition. </B>Air molecules in a box, for
example, can gather neatly in a corner, but are more likely to fill the
space evenly. <B>That's because there are overwhelmingly more arrangements
of the particles that will produce the spread out, jumbled state than
arrangements that will concentrate the molecules in a corner. This way of
thinking led to the famous notion of entropy </B>- a measure of the amount
of disorder in a system. In its most elegant formulation, <B>Boltzmann's
statistical mechanics, which was later developed mathematically by the
American physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs, asserts that, under many
conditions, a physical system will act so as to maximise its entropy.
</B><SPAN> </SPAN>And yet Boltzmann and Gibbs's statistical mechanics
doesn't explain everything: a great swathe of nature eludes its grasp
entirely. Boltzmann's guess about equal probabilities only works for systems
that have settled down to equilibrium, enjoying, for example, the same
temperature throughout. <B>The theory fails in any system where
destabilising external sources of energy are at work, such as the haphazard
motion of turbulent fluids or the fluctuating energies of cosmic rays.</B>
These systems don't follow normal statistics, but another pattern instead.
<SPAN> </SPAN><B>If you repeatedly measure the difference in fluid
velocity at two distinct points in a turbulent fluid, for instance, the
probability of finding a particular velocity difference is roughly
proportional to the amount of that difference raised to the power of some
exponent. This pattern is known as a "power law", and such patterns turn up
in many other areas of physics, from the distribution of energies of cosmic
rays to the fluctuations of river levels or wind speeds over a desert.
Because ordinary statistical mechanics doesn't explain power laws, their
atomic-level origins remain largely mysterious, </B>which is why many
physicists find Tsallis's mathematics so enticing.<SPAN> </SPAN><B>In
</B><B>Mexico City</B><B>, coming out of his reverie, Tsallis wrote</B> up
some notes on his idea, and soon came to a formula that looked something
like the standard formula for the Boltzmann-Gibbs entropy - but with a
subtle difference. <B>If he set q to 1 in the formula - so that pq became
the probability p - the new formula reduced to the old one. But if q was not
equal to 1,</B> it made the formula produce something else. <B>This led
Tsallis to a new definition of entropy. He called it q entropy.
</B><SPAN> </SPAN>Back then, Tsallis had no idea what q might actually
signify, but the way this new entropy worked mathematically suggested he
might be on to something. In particular, <B>the power-law pattern tumbles
out of the theory quite naturally. Over the past decade, researchers have
shown that Tsallis's mathematics seem to describe power-law behaviour
accurately in a wide range of phenomena, from fluid turbulence to the debris
created in the collisions of high-energy particles. </B>But while the idea
of maximising q entropy seems to work empirically, allowing people to fit
their data to power-law curves and come up with a value of q for individual
systems, it has also landed Tsallis in some hot water. The new mathematics
seems to work, <B>yet no one knows what the q entropy really represents, or
why any physical system should maximise it.</B> Degrees of chaos<SPAN>
</SPAN>And for this reason, many physicists remain sceptical, or worse. "I
have to say that I don't buy it at all," says physicist Cosma Shalizi of the
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who criticises the mathematical
foundations of Tsallis's approach. As he points out, <B>the usual Boltzmann
procedure for maximising the entropy in statistical mechanics assumes a
fixed value for the average energy of a system, a natural idea. But to make
things work out within the Tsallis framework, researchers have to fix the
value of another quantity - a "generalised" energy - that has no clear
physical interpretation. </B>"I have yet to encounter anyone," says Shalizi,
"who can explain why this should be natural."<SPAN> </SPAN>To his
critics, Tsallis's success is little more than sleight of hand: the equation
may simply provide a convenient way to generate power laws, which
researchers can then fit to data by choosing the right value of q "My
impression," says Guido Caldarelli of La Sapienza University in Rome, "is
that the method really just fits data by adjusting a parameter. I'm not yet
convinced there's new physics here." Physicist Peter Grassberger of the
University of Wuppertal in Germany goes further. "It is all nonsense," he
says. "It has led to no new predictions, nor is it based on rational
arguments." <SPAN> </SPAN>The problem is that most work applying
Tsallis's ideas has simply chosen a value of q to make the theory fit
empirical data, without tying q to the real dynamics of the system in any
deeper way: there's nothing to show why these dynamics depart from
Boltzmann's picture of equal probabilities. Tsallis, who is now at the Santa
Fe Institute in New Mexico, acknowledges this is a limitation, but suggests
that a more fundamental explanation is already on its way. <SPAN>
</SPAN><B>Power laws, he argues, should tend to arise in "weakly chaotic"
systems. In this kind of system, small perturbations might not be enough to
alter the arrangement of molecules. As a result, the system won't "explore"
all possible configurations over time. In a properly chaotic system, on the
other hand, even tiny perturbations will keep sending the system into new
configurations, allowing it to explore all its states as required for
Boltzmann statistics. <SPAN> </SPAN>Tsallis argues that <SPAN
style="BACKGROUND: yellow">if physicists can adequately understand the
details of this "exploring behaviour", they should be able to predict values
of q from first principles </SPAN>.</B> In particular, he proposes, some as
yet unknown single parameter - closely akin to q - should describe the
degree of chaos in any system. Working out its value by studying a system's
basic dynamics would then let physicists predict the value of q that then
emerges in its statistics. <SPAN> </SPAN>Other theoretical work seems
to support this possibility. For example, in a paper soon to appear in
Physical Review E, physicist Alberto Robledo of the National Autonomous
University of Mexico in Mexico City has examined several <B>classic models
that physicists have used to explore the phenomenon of chaos.</B> What makes
these models useful is that they <B>can be tuned to be more or less
chaotic</B> - and so used to explore the transition from one kind of
behaviour to another. Using these model systems, Robledo has been able to
carry out Tsallis's prescription, deriving a value of q just from studying
the system's fundamental dynamics. That value of q then reproduces intricate
power-law properties for these systems at the threshold of chaos. "This work
shows that q can be deduced from first principles," Tsallis says.
<SPAN> </SPAN>While Robledo has tackled theoretical issues, other
researchers have made the same point with real observations. <B>In a paper
just published, Leonard Burlaga and Adolfo Vinas at NASA's Goddard Space
Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, study fluctuations in the properties
of the solar wind - the stream of charged particles that flows outward from
the sun - and show that they conform to Tsallis's ideas. </B>They have found
that the dynamics of the solar wind, as seen in changes in its velocity and
magnetic field strength, display weak chaos of the type envisioned by
Tsallis. <B>Burlaga and Vinas have also found that the fluctuations of the
magnetic field follow power laws that fit Tsallis's framework with q set to
1.75</B> (Physica A, vol 356, p 275).<SPAN> </SPAN>The chance that a
more comprehensive formulation of Tsallis's q entropy might eventually be
found intrigues physicist Ezequiel Cohen of the Rockefeller University in
New York City. "I think a good part of the establishment takes an unfair
position towards Tsallis's work," he says. "The critique that all he does is
'curve fitting' is, in my opinion, misplaced." <SPAN> </SPAN>Cohen has
also started building his own work on Tsallis's foundations. <B>Two years
ago, with Christian Beck of Queen Mary, </B><B>University</B><B> of
</B><B>London</B><B>, he proposed an idea known as "superstatistics" that
would incorporate the statistics of both Boltzmann and Tsallis within a
larger framework. <SPAN> </SPAN>In this work they revisited the
limitation of Boltzmann's statistical mechanics. Boltzmann's models cannot
cope with any system in which external forces churn up differences such as
variations in temperature. A particle moving through such a system would
experience many temperatures for short periods and its fluctuations would
reflect an average of the ordinary Boltzmann statistics for all those
different temperatures. Cohen and Beck showed that such averaged statistics,
emerging out of the messy non-uniformity of real systems, take the very same
form as Tsallis statistics, and lead to power laws. In one striking example,
Beck showed how the distribution of the energies of cosmic rays could emerge
from random fluctuations in the temperature of the hot matter where they
were originally created. </B><SPAN> </SPAN>Cohen thinks that, if
nothing else, Tsallis's powers of probabilities have served to reawaken
physicists to fundamental questions they have never quite answered. After
all <B>Boltzmann's idea, though successful, was </B>also <B>based on a
guess; Albert Einstein disliked Boltzmann's arbitrary assumption of "equal
probabilities" and insisted that a proper theory of matter had to rest on a
deep understanding of the real dynamics of particles. </B><SPAN>
</SPAN>That understanding still eludes us, but Tsallis may have taken us
closer. It is possible that, in his mysterious q entropy, <B>Tsallis has
discovered a kind of entropy just as useful as Boltzmann's and especially
suited to the real-world systems in which the traditional theory fails.
</B>"Tsallis made the first attempt to go beyond Boltzmann," says Cohen. The
door is now open for others to follow. Close this window Printed on Thu Sep
01 01:17:25 BST 2005 </P></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT lang=0>----------<BR>Howard Bloom<BR>Author of The Lucifer
Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global
Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st
Century<BR>Recent Visiting Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York
University; Core Faculty Member, The Graduate Institute<BR><A
title=http://www.howardbloom.net/
onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"
href="http://www.howardbloom.net/"
target=_blank>www.howardbloom.net</A><BR><A
title=http://www.bigbangtango.net/
onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"
href="http://www.bigbangtango.net/"
target=_blank>www.bigbangtango.net</A><BR>Founder: International
Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution Society;
founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango Media
Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the
Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political
Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for
Human Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ;
executive editor -- New Paradigm book series. <BR>For information on The
International Paleopsychology Project, see: <A
title=http://www.paleopsych.org/
onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"
href="http://www.paleopsych.org/"
target=_blank>www.paleopsych.org</A><BR>for two chapters from <BR>The
Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History, see
<A title=http://www.howardbloom.net/lucifer
onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"
href="http://www.howardbloom.net/lucifer"
target=_blank>www.howardbloom.net/lucifer </A><BR>For information on Global
Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see
<A title=http://www.howardbloom.net/
onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"
href="http://www.howardbloom.net/" target=_blank>www.howardbloom.net
</A><BR></FONT></DIV></FONT><BR>_______________________________________________<BR>paleopsych
mailing list<BR><A title=mailto:paleopsych@paleopsych.org
onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"
href="mailto:paleopsych@paleopsych.org">paleopsych@paleopsych.org </A><BR><A
title=http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych
onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"
href="http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych"
target=_blank>http://lists.paleopsych.org/mailman/listinfo/paleopsych</A><BR><BR><BR></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR></FONT></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV>
<DIV></DIV></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT lang=0 face=Arial size=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF"
PTSIZE="10">----------<BR>Howard Bloom<BR>Author of The Lucifer Principle: A
Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History and Global Brain: The Evolution
of Mass Mind From The Big Bang to the 21st Century<BR>Recent Visiting
Scholar-Graduate Psychology Department, New York University; Core Faculty
Member, The Graduate
Institute<BR>www.howardbloom.net<BR>www.bigbangtango.net<BR>Founder:
International Paleopsychology Project; founding board member: Epic of Evolution
Society; founding board member, The Darwin Project; founder: The Big Bang Tango
Media Lab; member: New York Academy of Sciences, American Association for the
Advancement of Science, American Psychological Society, Academy of Political
Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, International Society for Human
Ethology; advisory board member: Institute for Accelerating Change ; executive
editor -- New Paradigm book series.<BR>For information on The International
Paleopsychology Project, see: www.paleopsych.org<BR>for two chapters from
<BR>The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History,
see www.howardbloom.net/lucifer<BR>For information on Global Brain: The
Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century, see
www.howardbloom.net<BR></FONT></DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>