Daily Page: 2025-12-08

Complexity science and thermodynamics intersect by linking energy flows, entropy, and information to the emergence and maintenance of organized structures. Non-equilibrium thermodynamics shows that open systems driven by gradients dissipate energy and can self-organize into far-from-equilibrium steady states (dissipative structures).

Complexity frameworks add networked interactions, multiscale feedback, and adaptive dynamics, explaining how macroscopic order, patterns, and computation arise from microscopic fluctuations.

Information processing—measurement, storage, and erasure—carries thermodynamic costs and effects causal mechanisms of action, both constraining adaptation and catalyzing innovation.

Together they explain living systems, ecosystems, and engineered networks as energy-consuming, information-managing structures whose robustness, adaptability, and diversity reflect trade-offs between dissipation, entropy production, and informational constraints.