Tuesday, April 4, 2017 - 4:00pm to 5:00pm
1080 Physics Research Building - Smith Seminar Room - reception at 3:45pm in the Atrium
From atoms to stars, physically-bound systems result from the interplay between attractive and repulsive interactions. In this lecture, I will present a new measure of complexity called "Configurational Entropy". Inspired by Shannon's information entropy, I will show how the configurational entropy encodes information about the shape and the stability of various physical objects, and how it can be used as an efficient measure of emerging complexity during nonequilibrium phenomena. Applications to be discussed will include atoms, solitons, compact astrophysical objects, spontaneous symmetry breaking, and inflationary cosmology.