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9. Self-Organized Criticality > Sand Piles
Sand Piles
In 1987, Bak, Tang, and Wiesenfeld published a paper in
Physical Review Letters, “Self-organized
criticality: An explanation of noise.” You can download it from
http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v59/i4/p381_1.
The title takes some explaining. A system is critical if it is in transition between two phases; for example, water at its freezing point is a critical system.
A variety of critical systems demonstrate common behaviors:
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Long-tailed distributions of some physical quantities: for example, in freezing water, the distribution of crystal sizes is characterized by a power law.
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Fractal geometries: freezing water tends to form fractal patterns—the canonical example is a snowflake. Fractals are characterized by self-similarity; that is, parts of the pattern resemble scaled copies of the whole.
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