A celebrated and controversial hypothesis suggests that some biological systems—parts,
aspects, or groups of them—may extract important functional benefits from operating at the …

Crackling noise arises when a system responds to changing external conditions through
discrete, impulsive events spanning a broad range of sizes. A wide variety of physical …

When the probability of measuring a particular value of some quantity varies inversely as a
power of that value, the quantity is said to follow a power law, also known variously as Zipf's …

and acknowledgments Self-organized criticality is a new way of viewing nature. The basic
picture is one where nature is perpetually out of balance, but organized in a poised state-the …

This essential reference for graduate students and researchers provides a unified treatment
of earthquakes and faulting as two aspects of brittle tectonics at different timescales. The …

To understand whether the 1992 M= 7.4 Landers earthquake changed the proximity to
failure on the San Andreas fault system, we examine the general problem of how one …

Concepts, methods and techniques of statistical physics in the study of correlated, as well as
uncorrelated, phenomena are being applied ever increasingly in the natural sciences …

This text provides an introduction to the exciting new developments in chaos and related
topics in nonlinear dynamics, including the detection and quantification of chaos in …

Over the past two decades percolation theory has been used to explain and model a wide
variety of phenomena that are of industrial and scientific importance. Examples include …

Sliding friction is one of the oldest problems in physics and certainly one of the most
important from a practical point of view. The ability to produce durable low-friction surfaces …