Uploaded March 2025 | Updated September 2026, 7 hours ago
Complexogenesis
Increasing entropy is often glossed as increasing disorder or randomness. But in the evolution from the low-entropy early universe to the high-entropy future, complex structures apparently come into existence along the way. This isn’t in violation of the Second Law, as the formation and persistence of complex structures can be entropy-increasing processes; but it does raise the question of whether the appearance of complexity is automatic, and what kinds of rules govern it. I will propose a classification of different kinds of complex physical structures, discuss when and how they arise dynamically in undirected thermodynamic evolution, and relate them to issues of information and statistical physics.
Complexogenesis
Increasing entropy is often glossed as increasing disorder or randomness. But in the evolution from the low-entropy early universe to the high-entropy future, complex structures apparently come into existence along the way. This isn’t in violation of the Second Law, as the formation and persistence of complex structures can be entropy-increasing processes; but it does raise the question of whether the appearance of complexity is automatic, and what kinds of rules govern it. I will propose a classification of different kinds of complex physical structures, discuss when and how they arise dynamically in undirected thermodynamic evolution, and relate them to issues of information and statistical physics.
