Critical phenomena

In physics, critical phenomena is the collective name associated with the physics of critical points. Quotes The mathematical theory of critical phenomena is currently undergoing intense development. Intertwined with the science of phase transitions, it draws on ideas from probability theory and statistical physics. Timothy Gowers June Barrow-Green Imre Leader The Princeton Companion to Mathematics http://books.google.com/books?id=ZOfUsvemJDMC&pg=PA657 18 July 2010 Princeton University Press 1-4008-3039-7 657 [A]s a liquid changes into a gas at the critical temperature , the heat capacity diverges as . The exponent is not known precisely. It is thought not to be a rational number, but should instead be viewed as a universal mathematical constant, similar to or , but more subtle. Remarkably, the same exponent occurs for all gases. It also occurs in other systems, including a certain class of magnets. It's as if all knowledge of the microscopic physics has been washed away, leaving us with something pure, that carries only a vague memory of what lies underneath. This phenomenon is known as universality... In our attempt to understand what happens as water boils, we will need to develop new tools and a new way of thinking about the world. This leads us to a paradigm which now underlies huge swathes of physics, far removed from its humble origin of a pot on a stove. This paradigm revolves around two deep facts about the Universe we inhabit: Nature is organised by symmetry. And Nature is organised by scale. David Tong: Lectures on Statistical Field Theory, 2017. External links Category:Physics Category:Mathematics