The Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften: Events

Monday, 01 April 2019, 11:00-17:00
Venue: Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, Conference Room

Research project »Complexity in Science, Culture, and Society«
Public Lecture and Workshop

George Ellis (University of Cape Town, South Africa)
»Complexity: The Interplay between bottom-up and top-down Causation«

The speaker
George Ellis is cosmologist and Professor of Applied Mathamtecis at the Unviersity of Cape Town in South Africa.. Zu seinen bekanntesten Werken gehört das gemeinsam mit Stehen Hawking verfasste Buch The Large Scale Structure of Space-time (Cambridge University Press 1973).

The lecture (11 a.m. to 1 p.m.)
A key question in science is how complexity such as occurs in biology, where contextual choices are being made all the time, arises out of the underlying fundamental physics governed by Hamiltonian dynamics, where (because of standard existence and uniqueness theorems) no such branching dynamics may be expected to occur. The case will be made that such emergence of completely new properties is enabled by a combination of bottom up emergence of higher level properties together with top-down control of lower level properties. The key link allowing this to happen is the way biomolecules such as voltage-gated ion channels enable contextual branching logic at the cellular level to arise from the underlying physics. Such branching biological behaviour then acts down to cause the underlying physical interactions to also exhibit contextual branching behaviour, because the Hamiltonian dynamics at that level is subject to time-dependent constraints that shape outcomes according to higher level contexts. Cell signalling networks are the biological mechanism allowing this to happen. A simple model of the physics allowing this to happen is given by a pendulum of varying length L(t); the standard Hamiltonian existence and uniqueness theorems do not apply in this case, because outcomes depend on L(t).
Please register in advance: info@forschungskolleg-humanwissenschaften.de

The workshop (2 p.m. to 5 p.m.)
The seminar is based on George Ellis' paper »The Dynamical Emergence of Biology From Physics: Branching Causation via Biomolecules«.
Information and registration: Dr. Thomas Schimmer (Email: t.schimmer@forschungskolleg-humanwissenschaften.de; Tel.: 06172 / 13977-14)

Lecture and Workshop are part of the research project »Complexity in Science, Culture, and Society«, conducted by Matthias Lutz-Bachmann (Professor of Philosophy at Goethe University) and Harald Schwalbe (Professor of Organic Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Goethe University). It is funded by the avendtis foundation.

Mit freundlicher Unterstützung der