#statisticalphysics — Public Fediverse posts

New Study Reveals Language Evolves in Predictable, Weather-Like Patterns, Researchers Say

Language is ever evolving—from ancient dialects to modern slang, the words and accents people use are…
#NewsBeep #News #Science #AU #Australia #culturallinguistics #dialects #JamesBurridge #language“weathermap” #languagechange #languageevolution #languagemapping #linguisticpatterns #regionalaccents #sociolinguistics #Statisticalphysics #UniversityofPortsmouth #wordspread
https://www.newsbeep.com/au/660727/

The #paperOfTheDay is a classic of #thermodynamics : "Equation of state in the Neighborhood of the critical point" from 1965. Here, Benjamin Widom introduces what is now known as "Widom scaling".
Generically, the properties of a fluid might depend on parameters, such as temperature or density, through power laws. There are certain critical points in the phase space, i.e. certain temperatures, densities, etc., where the behaviour of the fluid changes qualitatively. The observation is that close to the critical point, the exponents of the various power laws have different numerical values than what one would expect classically. For example, the specific heat diverges at a power law, but the exponent of divergence is not what one would expect from the conventional equation of state.
Widom's paper now makes a specific conjecture: Near a critical point, the equation of state should be altered by introducing an arbitrary function of density of temperature, however, this function is assumed to be homogeneous. That is if x is temperature and y is density, it is a function of the form e.g. x^c * f(y/x), where f is an arbitrary function of y/x, and c is a constant. It turns out that almost all experimental observations can be described from this conjecture without knowing the functional form of f. The scaling exponent c alone is sufficient to give rise to the non-classical power laws and the relations between them.
This paper is significant because it is an early (and purely heuristic) version of universality: The behaviour of systems in #statisticalPhysics at the critical point is largely determined from structural properties, independently of concrete details.
https://pubs.aip.org/aip/jcp/article-abstract/43/11/3898/210917/Equation-of-State-in-the-Neighborhood-of-the?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Why can’t I remember? Model may show how recall can fail - Enlarge (credit: Serdar Acar / EyeEm)
Physicists can create serious mathematical models of stuff ... more: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1648447 #statisticalphysics #memoryrecall #powerlaw #science