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Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Tripping on Network Fractals

As I was flying over LA at night it looked like an electric circuit, which set me to thinking about how circuits, the human body and cities all have parallel structure.
How do circuits work? Take a bunch of specialized components - capacitors, inductors, resistors, diodes, transistors - make larger specialized components - like an op-amp or cpu - and attach them with wires, which lead to bigger wires... from specialized components a structure emerges that performs a complex task.
This is like our bodies, where we have specialized cells which group together to make organs, bones, and tissues, which then group together to make the body, where microvessels merge to vessels which merge to arteries, yielding access to all components.
And, this is like cities where we have specialized components - homes, bakeries, laundromats, law offices - which group together to make larger specialized components - business district, residential neighborhood, agriculture - connected by lanes which lead to roads which lead to freeways.
One analogy that emerges is that people are the current of cities; the difference is that humans themselves are complex systems, whereas electrons are simple 2-state systems, fundamental particles...or are they? We discovered that protons and neutrons are comprised of quarks and gluons, and are now probing to see what those are made of. Could electrons also have a complex structure?
Similarly, given an electron's Hamiltonian, the evolution of the system is probabilistic, so given a human's Hamiltonian, is our behavior also probabilistic?
Can we make a single electron carry information from points A to B, or is it going to forget the information along the way?

2 comments:

  1. Hi , I'm a composer and musician , I love your second Photo on Tripping on Network Fractals.
    Could I use it for a CD cover ?
    thanks

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    Replies
    1. My name is Giuseppe Bonomo , cosmicpep@yahoo.it

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