Ricard Solé
banner
ricardsole.bsky.social
Ricard Solé
@ricardsole.bsky.social

Scientist & skeptic. Dad. Book addict. Pathologically curious. Origins and Evolution of Complexity, Synthetic Transitions, Liquid Brains, and Earth Terraformation. ICREA + SFI professor. Author. Secular humanist.

Biology 28%
Physics 16%
Pinned
Back to @sfiscience.bsky.social joining the night shift (with some extra coffee) at the Cormac McCarthy's Library. Working on criticality + cancer, statistical physics of ant colonies, the Physarum Lagrangian, universal genetic codes, synthetic agriculture & hybrid agencies.
@jordiplam.bsky.social

Que és el temps? Una qüestió fonamental de la que ens parlarà la investigadora @gemmadlc.bsky.social sky.social
sobre les lliçons sorprenents de la física quant a la seva naturalesa @esfcatalunya.bsky.social @icreacommunity.bsky.social ajuntament.barcelona.cat/biblioteques @museuciencies.cat

Well, that has been changing over the last years, with the growth of interest on tipping points across disciplines, including psychology www.sfipress.org/books/comple...
Complex-Systems Research in Psychology — SFI Press
Humans are the ultimate complex systems. In this monograph intended for psychologists and social scientists interested in modeling psychological processes, Han L. J. van der Maas argues that we can on...
www.sfipress.org

Is there a mathematics of discontinuous behavior? Christopher Zeeman was a leading proponent of Catastrophe Theory, a topological approach to sudden change that underpins much of today’s work on tipping points. This is his beautiful 1976 paper in @sciam.bsky.social www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2...

It's something that has been around for a long time now and that several scholars have explored over the years (including myself). Deep constraints might be limiting the space of the possible.

Good question. My guess is that they would occupy a really small part of the space.

Amen.
Why does life explore so few of the forms it could possibly take? Using fractal descriptors, this #scienceadvances paper shows that Earth’s biosphere clusters around simple shapes, reflecting deep evolutionary constraints. @artemyte.bsky.social @manlius.bsky.social www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

Can a single mathematical edxpression capture the whole spectrum of shapes that can exist? An attempt towards the "super formula" was made in this paper by Johan Gielis, revealing a novel and powerful way to study universal natural forms & phenomena. @manlius.bsky.social @jordipinero.bsky.social

Reposted by Ricard V. Solé

Reposted by Ricard V. Solé

Reposted by Ricard V. Solé

Reposted by Ricard V. Solé

Reposted by Ricard V. Solé

Reposted by Ricard V. Solé

Reposted by Ricard V. Solé

Reposted by Ricard V. Solé

We often think of our genes as the script of our fate. But genes are not the whole story. www.quantamagazine.org/how-metaboli...

How much can we say about the complexity of brains and minds from low-scale, molecular and sub-cellular events? Here's my drawing of Cajal's Demon, an entity that tries to do that @manlius.bsky.social @lmprida.bsky.social @mkhochb.bsky.social @drmichaellevin.bsky.social @wiringthebrain.bsky.social

Afternoon walk with my kids in a cold Barcelona day.

Reposted by Ricard V. Solé

Reposted by Ricard V. Solé

Reposted by Ricard V. Solé

Reposted by Ricard V. Solé

Reposted by Ricard V. Solé

Reposted by Ricard V. Solé

Netflix’s Stranger Things is more interesting: it leans on Einstein instead. I’ll let myself be a bit more speculative than usual and ask a simple question: if the Upside Down had to obey physics, what would it have to be?

Happy 2026!

👉 open.substack.com/pub/manlius/...

You might be right, but this is a remarkable, nontrivial object: fixed among the stars, unlike planets, it would appear as a vast, flattened, elliptical presence in the sky, with its ordered shape naturally inviting the idea of a coherent structure organized around a center.

Reposted by Ricard V. Solé

Rod Taylor—star of The Time Machine movie—had his nephew visit Barcelona this Christmas, where he discovered our time machine at "The Invention of Time" exhibition at #CentreMartorell. “It’s the most beautiful one in existence.” Come see it and travel with us! museuciencies.cat/exposicio_te...

Reposted by Ricard V. Solé