Talk by Prof. Makse at the Pujiang Forum on Innovation organized by Nature Physics in Shanghai, October 30-31, 2018. Talk of Prof Makse starts at 6:00 minutes.
Our research is related to “emergent properties”, i.e., “properties not contained in the simple laws of physics, although they are a consequence of them” (Phil Anderson, 1971, “More is different“).
As Schopenhauer¹, we conclude that “it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.”
By Joseph Campbell on Schopenhauer:
¹Schopenhauer, A. Transcendent Speculation on the Apparent Deliberateness in the Fate of the Individual, in Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, Vol. I, pp. 199-225 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1974).
“It’s the research we do that counts, not the journal”: “The reviewers have turn it into a porridge. You don’t want to publish porridge!”
Openings
Our group has openings for graduate students to work on granular matter and complex networks, broadly considered. For an account of the daily routine for students in our lab, see the report of Louis Portal, research intern from France. Our lab will be working under a fully remote mode for the foreseeable future.
Graduate students and postdocs working in our group are expected to be (or become) familiar with the following computing systems. There are also a number of pertinent videos here, by presenters at the NIPS conference.
For background on the research areas of the various group members, please click here.
