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Register a new userModeling the life and death of competing languages from a physical and mathematical perspective
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Recent contributions address the problem of language coexistence as that of two species competing to aggregate speakers, thus focusing on the dynamics of linguistic traits across populations. They draw inspiration from physics and biology and share some underlying ideas -- e. g. the search for minimal schemes to explain complex situations or the notion that languages are extant entities in a societal context and, accordingly, that objective, mathematical laws emerge driving the aforementioned dynamics. Different proposals pay attention to distinct aspects of such systems: Some of them emphasize the distribution of the population in geographical space, others research exhaustively the role of bilinguals in idealized situations (e. g. isolated populations), and yet others rely extremely on equations taken unchanged from physics or biology and whose parameters bear actual geometrical meaning. Despite the sources of these models -- so unrelated to linguistics -- sound results begin to surface that establish conditions and make testable predictions regarding language survival within populations of speakers, with a decisive role reserved to bilingualism. Here we review the most recent works and their interesting outcomes stressing their physical theoretical basis, and discuss the relevance and meaning of the abstract mathematical findings for real-life situations.
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Simulations of physicists for the competition between adult languages since 2003 are reviewed. How many languages are spoken by how many people? How many languages are contained in various language families? How do language similarities decay with geographical distance, and what effects do natural boundaries have? New simulations of bilinguality are given in an appendix.
The primordial confrontation underlying the existence of our universe can be conceived as the battle between entropy and complexity. The law of ever-increasing entropy (Boltzmann H-theorem) evokes an irreversible, one-directional evolution (or rather involution) going uniformly and monotonically from birth to death. Since the 19th century, this concept is one of the cornerstones and in the same time puzzles of statistical mechanics. On the other hand, there is the empirical experience where one witnesses the emergence, growth and diversification of new self-organized objects with ever-increasing complexity. When modeling them in terms of simple discrete elements one finds that the emergence of collective complex adaptive objects is a rather generic phenomenon governed by a new type of laws. These emergence laws, not connected directly with the fundamental laws of the physical reality, nor acting in addition to them but acting through them were called by Phil Anderson More is Different, das Maass by Hegel etc. Even though the emergence laws act through the intermediary of the fundamental laws that govern the individual elementary agents, it turns out that different systems apparently governed by very different fundamental laws: gravity, chemistry, biology, economics, social psychology, end up often with similar emergence laws and outcomes. In particular the emergence of adaptive collective objects endows the system with a granular structure which in turn causes specific macroscopic cycles of intermittent fluctuations.
Hercules is a dwarf spheroidal satellite of the Milky Way, found at a distance of about 138 kpc, and showing evidence of tidal disruption. It is very elongated and exhibits a velocity gradient of 16 +/- 3 km/s/kpc. Using this data a possible orbit of Hercules has previously been deduced in the literature. In this study we make use of a novel approach to find a best fit model that follows the published orbit. Instead of using trial and error, we use a systematic approach in order to find a model that fits multiple observables simultaneously. As such, we investigate a much wider parameter range of initial conditions and ensure we have found the best match possible. Using a dark matter free progenitor that undergoes tidal disruption, our best-fit model can simultaneously match the observed luminosity, central surface brightness, effective radius, velocity dispersion, and velocity gradient of Hercules. However, we find it is impossible to reproduce the observed elongation and the position angle of Hercules at the same time in our models. This failure persists even when we vary the duration of the simulation significantly, and consider a more cuspy density distribution for the progenitor. We discuss how this suggests that the published orbit of Hercules is very likely to be incorrect.
In the short time since the first observation of supersolid states of ultracold dipolar atoms, substantial progress has been made in understanding the zero-temperature phase diagram and low-energy excitations of these systems. Less is known, however, about their finite-temperature properties, particularly relevant for supersolids formed by cooling through direct evaporation. Here, we explore this realm by characterizing the evaporative formation and subsequent decay of a dipolar supersolid by combining high-resolution in-trap imaging with time-of-flight observables. As our atomic system cools towards quantum degeneracy, it first undergoes a transition from thermal gas to a crystalline state with the appearance of periodic density modulation. This is followed by a transition to a supersolid state with the emergence of long-range phase coherence. Further, we explore the role of temperature in the development of the modulated state.
In this work we study a simple compartmental model for drinking behavior evolution. The population is divided in 3 compartments regarding their alcohol consumption, namely Susceptible individuals $S$ (nonconsumers), Moderate drinkers $M$ and Risk drinkers $R$. The transitions among those states are ruled by probabilities. Despite the simplicity of the model, we observed the occurrence of two distinct nonequilibrium phase transitions to absorbing states. One of these states is composed only by Susceptible individuals $S$, with no drinkers ($M=R=0$). On the other hand, the other absorbing state is composed only by Risk drinkers $R$ ($S=M=0$). Between these two steady states, we have the coexistence of the three subpopulations $S$, $M$ and $R$. Comparison with abusive alcohol consumption data for Brazil shows a good agreement between the models results and the database.
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