Emergent Definition and 71 Threads

Homework Statement A ray of monochromatic yellow light is incident in air on an equilateral triangular glass prism. This ray is in the same plane as the equilateral triangular cross section of the prism; the angle between the ray and the prism face is 60°, and the refractive index of the...

Are coincidences meaningful? Part of me thinks I should know better, that in an emergent mess of probabilities there will always be uncanny coincidences. But they still seem to me to be the best chance at finding meaning in this far end of the probabilty curve we call earthly life.

What is spacetime? Where does it come from? Oft asked questions here. I recently posted the summary of a Scientific American article (found by Marcus) under the thread title, Emergent Quantum Spacetime, https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=294666 Here is another view of how...

In the Cosmology forum a reference by Marcus references an article in Scientific American I think might be of interest to Quantum Physics readers: (What are the (quantum) building blocks of space and time?) http://www.signallake.com/innovation/SelfOrganizingQuantumJul08.pdf (by...

Ok, I doubt this belongs in this forum since it's purely speculative, but I was curious what work has been done in the direction of explaining emergent matter as a type of ramification? Namely, Sundance Bilson showed in a novel paper that he could create the first generation of the Standard...

Is there any doubt in the scientific community to the theory of emergent properties? I am of the opinion that they surely exist. In fact even today's fundamental particles might be an emergent property of something more fundamental. All of stat mech is a study of emergent properties, not to...

Does anyone know of any research programs out there that are considering physical structure formation in terms of emergent, self-organizing statistical manifolds, and does so without starting from some reasonable first principles without any structure or preconception of manifold, or ad hoc...

I posted announcement of the August workshop at MIT on the announcement sticky. there is a basic physics reason why emergent geometry is hot, probably several basic reasons. Let us know why you think it is. Here's my take. We see an explosion of meetings now about emergent geometry. The...

my thoughts on "Quantum Graphity: a model of emergent locality" I want to thank Marcus for bringing this to my attention. One thing I've wanted to see is a rigorous derivation of Wen's string net condensation, which gives rise to both U(1) gauge charge and electrons, with LQG's spin...

My thoughts "Emergent physics: Fermi point scenario G.E. Volovik" http://arxiv.org/abs/0801.0724 Emergent physics: Fermi point scenario G.E. Volovik What if Volovik is correct that the true TOE is some sort of Fermi point scenario? 1 string theory is dead, and SM particles are not...

String theorists (i.e Josh1) and LQG'ers (i.e Marcus) how promosing do you think Volvovik's Fermi-point scenario of emergent gravity as a TOE, he denies more than 4D as required by String theory, and denies quantizing GR and seems to denigrate gravity as spacetime, in favor of condense...

Some things are clearly fundamental, and some emergent. As examples of fundamental concepts I could mention energy, momentum and location. An object has a location in space, because its' particles each have own locations. On the other hand some things are emergent, for example behaviour of a...

I recently read a couple of books by Paul Davies, in which one of the main themes was that biology is characterized by emergent properties that can not be reduced to mere physics (self organization, consciousness and so on). I would like to hear what physicists have to say about this important...

Is emergent spacetime the same as saying background independence?

What are your thoughts, in general terms, on the notion of time as an emergent property? In what ways could time be a product and side effect of some other, move fundamental process or entity? I've been thinking on it, and I thought some other people's thoughts would be useful. Thanks!

I have for the past year (longer, actually) been working on the idea that neither gravitational nor inertial mass are intrinsic, but are instead emergent, arising from the interaction of matter with the all-pervasive field of the quantum vacuum. There are tantalizing leads of this concept in...

Let us say that we have accepted the mathematical existence of lines. I then intersect them at a point and have a new thing I call an angle. In the example the lines are analogous to axioms and angle to an emergent property. The question is what is the existential status of the angle? Its...

The Mind of Man There are many of us here at the Physics Forums who seem to think that the mind of man is nothing more than an emergent property of the electrochemical processes that go on in the physical brain; that any computer of sufficient size and complexity would develop...

After doing soemtime here researching the issues of quantum gravity and quantum geometry is has become pretty plain that we are operating from a area below Planck length that requires some rules about the order that would have to emerge? Is it unitary, that we might have look to people like...

Wow, this forum's changed a lot since the last time I logged-on... Anyway, since I may not be able to get back on the Forums again, I wanted to make sure that I explained something which I only sort of glossed over in previous threads, and which probably would have been useful in those...

I am currently talking to a science journalist who writes about quantum gravity related matters for a major german popular science magazine. He would like to see good popular accounts of the phenomenon that smooth spacetime is not an 'a priori' in string theory but an emergent property. I have...