Foundational Papers in Complexity Science pp. 1923–1936
DOI: 10.37911/9781947864542.63
The Physics of Fractals
Author: Gunnar Pruessner, Imperial College London
Excerpt
The field of self-organized criticality (SOC) began with this groundbreaking paper. To trot out the tired pun, it triggered an avalanche of scientific activity. Published in 1987, it appeared to be the perfect answer to the question for the physics of fractals that Leo Kadanoff (1986) had raised a year earlier, as the beauty of fractals gripped the imagination of many. Per Bak, Chao Tang, and Kurt Wiesenfeld’s work not only identified the physics of fractals, it did so in a quantitative manner, taking the exceptional features of critical phenomena to the real world, making emergence ubiquitous, and explaining, or at least attempting to explain, why and how “More is Different” (Anderson 1972). A follow-up to the present Physical Review Letter, published in Physical Review A the following year, clarified and extended the key ideas of SOC introduced in the present work (Bak, Tang, and Wiesenfeld 1988).
In hindsight, the connection to 1/f-noise that is being made in the title of the paper looks like an attempt to provide context, when otherwise there was very little—the paper contains only five references to previous work. The ideas by Bak, Tang, and Wiesenfeld were baffling, exceptionally innovative, and have little in the way of a precursor.
Bibliography
Anderson, P. W. 1972. “More Is Different.” Science 177:393. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.177.4047.393.
Bak, P., and C. Tang. 1989. Journal Geophysical Research 94:15635–7. https://doi.org/10.1029/JB094iB11p15635.
Bak, P., C. Tang, and K. Wiesenfeld. 1988. “Self-Organized Criticality.” Physical Review A 38 (1): 364–374. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.38.364.
Kadanoff, L. P. 1986. “Fractals: Where's the Physics?” Physics Today 39 (2): 6–7. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2814878.
Pruessner, G. 2012. Self-Organised Criticality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Watkins, N. W., G. Pruessner, S. C. Chapman, N. B. Crosby, and H. J. Jensen. 2016. Space Science Reviews 198:3. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11214-015-0155-x.