National Academies Press: OpenBook
Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Academy of Sciences. 2002. Self-Organized Complexity in the Physical, Biological, and Social Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10376.
×

Arthur M. Sackler COLLOQUIA OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

Self-Organized Complexity in the Physical, Biological, and Social Sciences

National Academy of Sciences
Washington, D.C.

Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Academy of Sciences. 2002. Self-Organized Complexity in the Physical, Biological, and Social Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10376.
×

Arthur M. Sackler, M.D.

1913–1987

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Arthur M.Sackler was educated in the arts, sciences, and humanities at New York University. These interests remained the focus of his life, as he became widely known as a scientist, art collector, and philanthropist, endowing institutions of learning and culture throughout the world.

He felt that his fundamental role was as a doctor, a vocation he decided upon at the age of four. After completing his internship and service as house physician at Lincoln Hospital in New York City, he became a resident in psychiatry at Creedmoor State Hospital. There, in the 1940s, he started research that resulted in more than 150 papers in neuroendocrinology, psychiatry, and experimental medicine. He considered his scientific research in the metabolic basis of schizophrenia his most significant contribution to science and served as editor of the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Psychobiology from 1950 to 1962. In 1960 he started publication of Medical Tribune, a weekly medical newspaper that reached over one million readers in 20 countries. He established the Laboratories for Therapeutic Research in 1938, a facility in New York for basic research that he directed until 1983.

As a generous benefactor to the causes of medicine and basic science, Arthur Sackler built and contributed to a wide range of scientific institutions: the Sackler School of Medicine established in 1972 at Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel; the Sackler Institute of Graduate Biomedical Science at New York University, founded in 1980; the Arthur M.Sackler Science Center dedicated in 1985 at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts; and the Sackler School of Graduate Biomedical Sciences, established in 1980, and the Arthur M.Sackler Center for Health Communications, established in 1986, both at Tufts University, Boston, Massachusetts.

His pre-eminence in the art world is already legendary. According to his wife Jillian, one of his favorite relaxations was to visit museums and art galleries and pick out great pieces others had overlooked. His interest in art is reflected in his philanthropy; he endowed galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Princeton University, a museum at Harvard University, and the Arthur M.Sackler Gallery of Asian Art in Washington, DC. True to his oft-stated determination to create bridges between peoples, he offered to build a teaching museum in China, which Jillian made possible after his death, and in 1993 opened the Arthur M.Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology at Peking University in Beijing.

In a world that often sees science and art as two separate cultures, Arthur Sackler saw them as inextricably related. In a speech given at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Some reflections on the arts, sciences and humanities, a year before his death, he observed: “Communication is, for me, the primum movens of all culture. In the arts…I find the emotional component most moving. In science, it is the intellectual content. Both are deeply interlinked in the humanities.” The Arthur M.Sackler Colloquia at the National Academy of Sciences pay tribute to this faith in communication as the prime mover of knowledge and culture.

Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Academy of Sciences. 2002. Self-Organized Complexity in the Physical, Biological, and Social Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10376.
×

Self-Organized Complexity in the Physical, Biological, and Social Sciences

March 23–24, 2001

Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center, Irvine, CA

Organized by Donald L.Turcotte, John Rundle, and Hans Frauenfelder

Program

Friday, March 23

James Bassingthwaighte, University of Washington

Assessing Biological Complexity via the Physiome Project

Ary Goldberger, Harvard University

Fractal Scaling in Health and its Breakdown with Aging and Disease

Joel Cohen, The Rockefeller University

The Distribution of Human Population Density

Hans Frauenfelder, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Protein Quakes Revisited

John J.Hopfield, Princeton University

On the Role of Collective Dynamical Variables in Neurobiological Computation

Gene Stanley, Boston University

Quantifying Fluctuations in Economic Systems by Adapting Methods of Statistical Physics

Didier Sornette, University of California, Los Angeles

Predictability of Catastrophic Events: From Rupture to Crashes

Doyne Farmer, Santa Fe Institute

Agent-Based Models of Price Dynamics

Jean Carlson, University of California, Santa Barbara

Complexity and Robustness

Walter Willinger, AT&T Labs

Scaling Phenomena in the Internet: When Criticality Is Not Critical

Steve Strogatz, Cornell University

Exploring Complex Networks

Mark Newman, Santa Fe Institute

Theories and Experiments in Social Networks

Saturday, March 24

Claude Allègre, IPGP, Paris

Geochemical Distribution in the Earth from Rocks to Ore Deposits

Per Bak, Imperial College of Science, Technology, and Medicine

Forest Fires, Measles, and the Structure of the Universe

Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Academy of Sciences. 2002. Self-Organized Complexity in the Physical, Biological, and Social Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10376.
×

Zellman Warhaft, Cornell University

Turbulence in Nature and in the Laboratory

David Campbell, Boston University

Solitons, Fronts, and Vortices: Emergent Coherent Structures in Nonlinear Systems

Lenny Smith, University of Oxford

Lifting the Excuse of Chaos: Predictability, Uncertainty and Error

Michael Ghil, University of California, Los Angeles

Bifurcations and Pattern Formation in the Atmospheres and Oceans

Susan Kieffer, S.W.Kieffer Science Consulting, Inc.

Understanding Old Faithful as a Complex System

John Rundle, University of Colorado at Boulder

Physics of Earthquakes

Charlie Sammis, University of Southern California

Why is Earthquake Prediction so Difficult?

Sidney Nagel, University of Chicago

Jamming: From Granular Materials to Glasses

Kenneth Slocum, SENCORP

Human Organizations as Fractally Scaled Structures

John D.Pelletier, University of Arizona

Signature of Self-Organization in Climatology and Geomorphology

Sarah F.Tebbens, University of South Florida

Self-Organized Complexity in the Marine Sciences

Donald L.Turcotte, Cornell University

Self-Organization of Natural Hazards

Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Academy of Sciences. 2002. Self-Organized Complexity in the Physical, Biological, and Social Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10376.
×

PNAS

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Contents

Papers from the Arthur M.Sackler Colloquium of the National Academy of Sciences

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 

 

   

Self-organized complexity in the physical, biological, and social sciences
Donald L.Turcotte and John B.Rundle

 

2463

 

 

COLLOQUIUM PAPERS

 

 

   

Fractal dynamics in physiology: Alterations with disease and aging
Ary L.Goldberger, Luis A.N.Amaral, Jeffrey M.Hausdorff, Plamen Ch. Ivanov, C.-K.Peng, and H.Eugene Stanley

 

2466

   

Allometric scaling of metabolic rate from molecules and mitochondria to cells and mammals
Geoffrey B.West, William H.Woodruff, and James H.Brown

 

2473

   

Proteins: Paradigms of complexity
Hans Frauenfelder

 

2479

   

Turbulence in nature and in the laboratory
Z.Warhaft

 

2481

   

What might we learn from climate forecasts?
Leonard A.Smith

 

2487

   

“Waves” vs. “particles” in the atmosphere’s phase space: A pathway to long-range forecasting?
Michael Ghil and Andrew W.Robertson

 

2493

   

Positive feedback, memory, and the predictability of earthquakes
C.G.Sammis and D.Sornette

 

2501

   

Unified scaling law for earthquakes
Kim Christensen, Leon Danon, Tim Scanlon, and Per Bak

 

2509

   

Self-organization in leaky threshold systems: The influence of near-mean field dynamics and its implications for earthquakes, neurobiology, and forecasting
J.B.Rundle, K.F.Tiampo, W.Klein, and J.S.Sá Martins

 

2514

   

Predictability of catastrophic events: Material rupture, earthquakes, turbulence, financial crashes, and human birth
Didier Sornette

 

2522

   

Self-organization, the cascade model, and natural hazards
Donald L.Turcotte, Bruce D.Malamud, Fausto Guzzetti, and Paola Reichenbach

 

2530

   

Complexity and robustness
J.M.Carlson and John Doyle

 

2538

   

Natural variability of atmospheric temperatures and geomagnetic intensity over a wide range of time scales
Jon D.Pelletier

 

2546

   

Wavelet analysis of shoreline change on the Outer Banks of North Carolina: An example of complexity in the marine sciences
Sarah F.Tebbens, Stephen M.Burroughs, and Eric E.Nelson

 

2554

   

Self-organized complexity in economics and finance
H.E.Stanley, L.A.N.Amaral, S.V.Buldyrev, P.Gopikrishnan, V.Plerou, and M.A.Salinger

 

2561

   

Random graph models of social networks
M.E.J.Newman, D.J.Watts, and S.H.Strogatz

 

2566

   

Scaling phenomena in the Internet: Critically examining criticality
Walter Willinger, Ramesh Govindan, Sugih Jamin, Vern Paxson, and Scott Shenker

 

2573

Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Academy of Sciences. 2002. Self-Organized Complexity in the Physical, Biological, and Social Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10376.
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Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Academy of Sciences. 2002. Self-Organized Complexity in the Physical, Biological, and Social Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10376.
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Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Academy of Sciences. 2002. Self-Organized Complexity in the Physical, Biological, and Social Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10376.
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Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Academy of Sciences. 2002. Self-Organized Complexity in the Physical, Biological, and Social Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10376.
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Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Academy of Sciences. 2002. Self-Organized Complexity in the Physical, Biological, and Social Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10376.
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Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Academy of Sciences. 2002. Self-Organized Complexity in the Physical, Biological, and Social Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10376.
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Suggested Citation:"Front Matter." National Academy of Sciences. 2002. Self-Organized Complexity in the Physical, Biological, and Social Sciences. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/10376.
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