Agata Angelika RZOSKA and Aleksandra DROZD-RZOSKA, "The Story about One Island and Four Cities. The Socio-Economic Soft Matter Model - Based Report", Proceedings of 8th Socratic Lectures (2023). [1]
Agata Angelika SOJECKA and Aleksandra DROZD-RZOSKA, "Global population; from Super-Malthus behavior to Doomsday crtiticality.", Scientific Reports 14, 9853 (2024). [2]
NEW _ proposition of description of the World's Human Population
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In ref.[1], the evolutions of Rapa Nui (Easter Island: Pacific Ocean) and selected industrial/post-industrial cities are analyzed. For the latter, they are Detroit and Cleveland in the USA and Łódź and Bytom in Poland. In each case, their population rise was stimulated by a 'single' dominated type of industry.
The decay of these industries led to depopulation. A similar evolution pattern has been detected for Rapa Nui and the mentioned cities. The scaling behavior enabling reliable forecasting and offering a new look at the past are presented.
For cities, it occurs despite the apparent interactions with the surrounding, absent for naturally isolated Rapa Nui.
The population modeling revealed a deterministic patterns , enabling also reliable forecasting. The latter leads to conclusions not optimistic about the future.
The possibilities of describing global population changes using Super-Malthusian equations are discussed. It offers complementary interpretations recalling topics from complex systems and soft matter physics [2].
Such a parallel indicates the spontaneous creation of ‘aggregation centers’ characterized by differences in local dimensionality, as was shown in the discussion recalling the KWW (Kohlraush-Willimas-Watts) or the Avrami models. For the global human population, it can mean that the emergence of the first cities or civilizations can be the inherent feature of complex systems development with some interaction ability.
The developed scaling covers the period from the Holocene onset (10,000 BC) till now.
The Story about One Island and Four Cities. The Socio-Economic Soft Matter Model - Based Report.
The report shows that some aspects of the development of selected urban centers can be considered as a Socio-Economic Soft Matter entity, with the population dynamics described and explained under Soft Matter Science. The environment seems to be a kind of averaged factor - in Soft Matter it can be described as 'mean field approximation', which always results in a qualitative simplification of the description of important processes.
In such an approach, notable are similarities in population changes to bacteria develpopment in a container or the isolated human civilization on Rapa Nui island. For cities crucial is the existence of an 'attractor' , attracting people from outside the city. In turn, the population may start to leave the city when the attractor weakens. Significant can be the emergence of a new, much stronger 'attractor' nearby. In Poland, an example of such a new attractor can be Warsaw (population rise), located relatively close to Łódź (population decay), currently well connected, with attractive jobs, for various professions.
From soft matter dynamics to global population evolution.
In the globalized world of the 21st century, a reliable description of the evolution of the world's population is becoming increasingly important.
The global population can be considered as a unique model system because it develops in an 'isolated & defined' planetary system. In the report published in Scientific Reports, changes in the global evolution were tested in a new way, for the first time, using the analytic dataset obtained due to the numerical filtering of data from different sources. Further, it enabled the derivative-based and distortions-sensitive analysis, which has not been implemented so far.
The scaling equations are discussed by recalling: *the complex systems physics: (*) the Weibull distribution in extreme value theory, (**) KWW, glass transition physics issues, (***) dynamic & constarined critical phenomena physics. The significant historical and prehistoric issues revealed by distortion-sensitive analysis are recalled to show the origins of changes. The paper indicates that global population evolution can be non-monotonic, which yields a significant problem in long-term deterministic forecasting. It introduces an innovative way of data analysis sensitive to subtle deviations from model relations related to the 'bottom-up' methodology, which has hardly been used so far.
* 1. Popularization of knowledge, especially regarding Soft Matter Physics and the impact of High Pressure
* 2. Promoting achievements of young scientists associated with the X-PressMatter IHPP PAS Laboratory
* 3. Promoting knowledge about personalities of the world of science
* 4. Supporting co-organization/ organization of the "Show Yourself in Science" Workshop & International Seminar on Soft Matter
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Soft Matter systems have common features, such as the dominance of elements or local structures on the mesoscale, combined with their relatively weak interactions, which turns out to be sufficient to obtain a tendency to self-organize with even a small change in parameters. This additionally leads to extraordinary sensitivity to even minor endogenous and exogenous factors, e.g., nanoparticles and pressure. In the case of the latter, relatively low pressures P~1 GPa, or even much lower ones, can lead to phases/states with exotic features, often persisting after decompression.
Worth stressing, that for "classical hard matter" systems, a pressure similar to that at the Earth's core (~300 GPa) is typically required, and the resulting "exotic" properties most often disappear upon decompression.
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