In this wide-ranging interdialogue, I spoke with Argentinian complex systems scientist Dante Chialvo. Chialvo is a trained biologist who has dedicated much of his career to working in, and collaborating with, physicists, and was at the forefront of a movement that brought many physicists into the biological sciences between the 1980’s and 1990’s. In the early 90’s he was associated with the Sante Fe Institute, and was a full professor at Northwestern University and UCLA, before returning to Argentina as a principal investigator for CONICET, and to lead the Multidisciplinary Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences at the National University of San Martin in Buenos Aires.
Chialvo has researched diverse physical phenomena that cross many disciplines, based around scale-free non-linear dynamics, self-organized criticality, phase transitions and collective behavior, such as with cardiac arrhythmias, social insects, microorganisms and the immune system. But it is Chialvo’s wide-ranging work on the brain that he is best known for, and his pioneering work with the late Danish physicist and complex systems scientist Per Bak that explored the brain as a self-organizing critical system, has paved the way for much interdisciplinary research into neural networks and neuroimaging, including work on sleep, memory and psychedelics. Chialvo is also a strong proponent of universality as a guiding principle for scientific research and for uncovering fundamental physical laws, and we spoke about his paper “Life at the Edge,” which addresses the origin of complexity in nature through this lens of universality and fundamental physics.
We also spoke about the growth of complex systems science from a theoretical framework into a mature experimental science over the past decades, and also how the field is growing in different regions, including Latin America. We also discussed the importance of investing in science, and the troubling current circumstances for science, technology and innovation in Argentina. We began by speaking about how he, as a biologist, was brought into the now interdisciplinary world of complex systems science, a field that was first dominated by physicists.
00:00 The Journey into Complex Systems Research
16:13 Universality and Emergence of Collective Phenomena
39:03 Addressing Foundational Questions through Complex Systems
53:39 The Social and Environmental Aspect of Science in Complex Systems Research
56:56 The Multidisciplinary Nature of Complex Systems
58:24 Science and Education as Agents of Transformation
01:11:28 Challenges: Brain Drain and Extreme Ideologies
01:37:45 Recent Support for Science in Argentina
