Re: A question for the emergentists among you

Posted by Roger Critchlow-2 on Oct 12, 2009; 12:04am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/A-question-for-the-emergentists-among-you-tp3799888p3805391.html

On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 4:44 PM, Russ Abbott <[hidden email]> 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 --

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