The purpose of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop, upon which this book is based, was to bring together experimentalists and theorists from many different fields, ranging from applied mathematics to materials science, but unified by their intrigue with nonlinear phenomena, in search of a deeper understanding of patterns in complex systems. To meet this goal, the participants made the effort to build bridges across canonical disciplinary boundaries by sharing what they thought was significant and relevant in search of the “truly significant simplicity of the basic laws of nature embedded in the amazing complexity of natural phenomena.”Spatio-Temporal Patterns in Nonequilibrium Complex Systems is one of the most exciting and fastest-growing branches of physics that impacts fields as diverse as new technologies and processes, economics and biology. Virtually every structure in our world, including ourselves, can be considered the result of a long sequence of successive symmetry-breaking instabilities due to nonlinear processes under nonequilibrium conditions of a complex system. While a scientific description of the spontaneous appearance of patterns in nature was first made by Johannes Kepler (1611), it has only been during the past twenty years that pattern formation, epitomized by the beautiful snowflakes that Kepler studied, has emerged as a science. Concepts and methods resulting from this dynamic new field will surely influence future developments in many disciplines.Complex systems, as studied in this book, are a good first step toward a description of the variety of phenomena included under the rubric “physics of complex systems.” Even the simplest of those presented here, liquid crystals, is still complex, but provides hints of essential ingredients needed to forge a fundamental understanding of nonequilibrium, nonlinear processes in the large. Fluid dynamics and turbulence, interface motion during solidification, autocatalytic chemical reactions, and pattern formation in biological systems play similar roles in other systems far from equilibrium.
Patricia E. Cladis is a research physicist at AT&T Bell Laboratories. She is well-known for her discoveries of nonlinear physical phenomena in liquid crystals such as the spontaneous breaking of boundary condition symmetry, the reentrant nematic, and “Closing the Turing Loop.” Her current research interests include pattern formation in liquid crystals, and she has made in-depth evaluations of the Flat Panel Display Technologies in Japan, the former Soviet Union, and the United States. Dr. Cladis is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a 1993 Guggenheim Fellow. Peter Palffy-Muhoray is a research physicist at the Liquid Crystal Institute at Kent State University. He is associate director of the Liquid Crystal Institute, regional editor of Molecular Crystals and Liquid Crystals and of Liquid Crystals Today . Dr. Palffy-Muhoray is a member of the Advisory Board of the International Liquid Crystal Society.
