Workshops at the Dutch Institute for Emergent Phenomena

Gathering scientists and philosophers across the Netherlands and beyond

Current topics in information theory

8th - 12th of November 2021 | Amsterdam

Information theory is now a ubiquitous part of many fields of science, from physics to computer science. This workshop will gather experts in both classical and information theory, from high-energy physics to information processing in living systems, machine learning and computer science.

Organisers: Rick Quax, Felix Leditzky, Michael Walter and Jácome Armas

Out-of-equilibrium systems, emergence, and life

Workshop series since May 2020.

New meetings scheduled from 28th June 2011 to 14th February 2022 

The striking fact about many, and likely all, living systems is that they display robust, ordered and anticipatory (‘smart’) behaviour in spite of inherent stochasticity. When transitioning to the living state, material systems do not leave randomness behind, which makes their behaviour all the more difficult to understand, and difficult to emulate in artificial systems and models. It is currently unknown how to characterize, and to create or model, the energy-driven pathways out of the random and into the ordered state, or how to access such non-equilibrium states through energy-driven disorder-order transitions. This means that our understanding of out-of-equilibrium systems, emergence, and life, is still highly incomplete. This workshop brings experts from chemistry, physics, biology and computer science to tackle these questions.

Organisers: Sijbren Otto, Daniela Kraft, Peter Bolhuis, Wilhelm Huck, Patrick Onck.

Emergence in Physics

DIEP Summer school | 13th - 17th July 2020| @ Radboud University Nijmegen

This is the first Summer School organized by The Dutch Institute for Emergent Phenomena. The concept of emergence is often taken to mean that unexpected and fascinating high-level behaviour is produced by combining elementary low-level ingredients that interact in complex ways to give a whole that is "more than the sum of the parts”. However, this is only one aspect of emergence, and actions such as changing the scale of observation and/or taking limits may also give rise to emergent phenomena, even in relatively simple systems. There are examples of emergence all around us, from the fundamental physics of interacting particles or quantum gravity, to societal issues in health and finance. Finding out what links these examples and how to understand the links is our challenge. This school will provide you with the tools and attitude to work on emergence in physics and start making the connections to emergence in other fields.

from driven quantum matter to active metamaterials

Topology and broken symmetries:

1st - 3rd of July 2019 @ Utrecht University Library | Booth Hall

Over the last few years, there has been an explosion of activity in the fields of topological matter, active matter and designer matter. Concepts of symmetries and topology have been found as essential guiding principles to capture the emergence of new phases of matter such as frustration-free disorder, protected edge modes or non-reciprocal transport but remain elusive for far-from-equilibrium systems. This workshop aims at bringing together a broad group of scientists from the quantum and the classical worlds to identify the unifying concepts for the understanding of emergent electronic, mechanical, acoustic and electromagnetic properties of driven/active materials and metamaterials.

Hydrodynamics at all length scales

from high energy to hard and soft matter

18th - 22nd of November 2019 @ Lorentz Centre Snellius | Leiden

The recent rapid developments in hydrodynamic theory and its broad range of applicability beg for a gathering of three distinct communities, namely, high-energy physics, hard condensed matter and soft condensed matter, whose interaction in this subject matter is almost absent at the current time. This workshop will be the first and one of its kind, bringing scientists from widely separated areas of research both in the Netherlands and from abroad and giving them the opportunity of learning new techniques outside (but relevant to) their own field. Leading to substantial cross-fertilisation of methods and tools of different communities for solving problems in fluid dynamics at different length scales, this workshop will, in addition, foster novel interdisciplinary collaborations.

Emergence: conceptual and philosophical aspects

9th - 11th of May 2019 @ Mediamatic | Amsterdam

The phenomenon of emergence seems to pervade a broad class of disciplines while simultaneously being notoriously difficult to define in precise terms. Philosophers and scientists have attempted to catalogue different aspects and distinguish between distinct types of emergent behaviour. Artists, inspired by some of these ideas, have attempted to portray it in a variety of forms. The result of this multiplicity of endeavours is far from a unified theory or common perspective on emergence.

Featuring names of scientists and philosophers such as Piers Coleman, Robert Battterman, Nigel Goldenfeld, James Ladyman, Alexandre Guay, Eleanor Knox, Elena Catellani, among many others, this workshop aims at bringing together conceptual analyses and examples of emergence in different sciences (including physics, astronomy, cosmology, chemistry, earth science, biology) in order to better understand its scientific importance.