Renormalization: Seeing Across Scales
To understand a system one need not track every detail.
To understand a system one need not track every detail.
Cool water and at a precise point it becomes ice, its character transformed.
Add links to a scattered set of nodes and for a long while little changes.
In many real networks, most nodes have few connections while a handful have enormous numbers.
Most things cluster around an average, but some do not.
At the knife's edge between rigid order and formless chaos lies a special state where systems become exquisitely responsive.
Order can arise from within, unbidden and unplanned.
Left to run, a system tends toward certain states and shuns others.
In some systems the faintest difference at the start becomes an enormous difference later.
A system can be entirely deterministic yet utterly unpredictable.