Abstract
In relating the circumstances that led to the birth and development of the physics of complex systems in Cuba, it is difficult to avoid being anecdotal—particularly because of the difficult times during which this research started. Cuban eclecticism, whose spectrum extends from religious syncretism to world-class medicine, seems quite coherent with the field of complex systems, characterized by the synergy of diverse fields. Such a combination, however, in the beginning seemed to be quite removed from the physicists’ standard research dogmas.
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Notes
- 1.
Generally, members of the group explicitly state their affiliation to it in the papers they author or coauthor.
- 2.
Gaussian or other peaked distributions imply that there exists a characteristic size.
- 3.
One clever detail of the setup was an inclined, rotating glass tube able to deliver grains of sand to “feed” the pile from the apex in a very slow way—not grain by grain, but almost.
- 4.
Some of them systematically transporting members of the “Henri Poincaré” Group, but this is not the kind of bicycle role we want to underline in this paper.
- 5.
This name comes from the Spanish word “chícharo,” meaning “pea” in English. In fact, the experiment was originally conceived for peas, but these got bugs, so the authors decided to switch to the much less edible ball bearings.
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Sotolongo-Costa, O. (2014). The Physics of Complex Systems in Cuba. In: Baracca, A., Renn, J., Wendt, H. (eds) The History of Physics in Cuba. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 304. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8041-4_16
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