Dave Feldman

David P. Feldman

I have had the pleasure of being on the faculty of the Complex Systems Summer School since 2004, our first year in China. Last year I served as co-director the CSSS with Dr. Xiaosong Chen of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Beijing, and I am pleased to do so again in 2007.

In the past several years, my lectures have covered a number of foundational topics in complex systems, including chaos, information theory, computation theory, and measures of complexity. I'll speak on a similar mix of topics this year.

I'm looking forward to meeting you and working with you in July. I think we have a great line-up of students and faculty.

Much more (too much) information about me can be found on my home page.

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Five Questions

1. What topics do you have some expertise in and would you be willing to help others learn them? Well, I'll be lecturing on chaos, information theory, computation theory, and measures of complexity. Chaos, info theory, and complexity measures I'm all very familiar with, as I've used them in my research quite a bit. I'm much less of an expert on computation theory. My background is in statistical physics, so I'd be happy to help people with questions in this area if I can. More generally, over the last few years I've taught lots of different math classes, as I'm essentially the only math and professor at the college where I work.
2. What do you want to learn at the CSSS? I'm particularly looking forward to some of the lecturers that I haven't heard before: Burkhead, Glazier, Pepper, Jin, Smith. I'm also looking forward to learning from the students as they do their projects and take part in discussions.
3. Do you have any projects or research interests that would benefit from an interdisciplinary approach?
4. Do you have any ideas for what sort of project you would like to do this summer?
5. Suppose you could travel one-hundred years in the future and ask researchers any three questions. What would those questions be? Choosing only three is really hard. Let's see. I'll cheat some by listing three clusters of questions:
   1. Has quantum mechanics been replaced by any other theory? Is the EPR paradox still vexing? And did string theory amount to anything, or was it just some cool mathematics and speculative physics?
   2. What has the "complex systems" approach lead to? Are there any unifying principles of complex systems, or is complex systems more a set of tools and methods? (My guess is the latter, but time will tell.) What do academic disciplines look like now? Are academic departments configured pretty much as they were in 2000, or are disciplines now more or less obsolete?
   3. What do we use for energy now? How much does a barrel of oil cost? Have we found replacements for fossil fuels? And if so, who were leaders in the transition away from fossil fuels? Was the transition a peaceful one, or were there wars and famine? Have we made meaningful progress on global warming?

By the way, I got the idea for asking these questions from an essay by David Mermin that appeared in Physics Today in 2001. In the essay, Mermin came up with a list of ten questions for physicists in 2100. The original essay can be found here. I think you have to be an APS or AAPT member to access this. However, all should be able to access this talk by Mermin in which he gives his ten questions and discusses his thinking behind each of them.