Over the past two decades, complexity science has matured from its origins as a small, largely esoteric subfield of theoretical statistical physics and mathematics into an expansive area of inquiry that bridges disciplines and addresses some of the world’s most acute interconnected challenges.  Nowhere has this interdisciplinary, applied process become more apparent than with the ongoing convergence of complexity and health.  This convergence is happening at all scales—individual and collective, private and public—across approaches to prevention, treatment, management, and containment in integrative and public health spaces, as well as through applied research and innovation. “Our methodological approach goes on and on down to the level of microbiology and finally finding cures for many diseases,” says Italian American physicist and complex networks scientist Alessandro Vespignani. “All that goes through networks and through a vision that has complex systems at the core. Network science is a way to approach complex systems,” Vespignani explained from within Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute, where he serves as director, leads the Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-technical Systems (MOBS) lab, and heads several impactful public health initiatives. “We look at elements and their interactions, and we do not get rid of nonlinear phenomena, feedback loops, et cetera, that exist in real world systems; we need to consider those,” Vespignani continues. “And in that sense, there is even more urgency in the work that we as a community do to respond to those challenges and to be of service to the society.” Explore the full InterDialogue with Alessandro Vespignani. The COVID-19 pandemic served as a critical moment of applied research and broad engagement with public health policy for those, like Vespignani, who work at the interface of complexity and health. But theoretical research and its translation into experiments and action began several years prior and...

Jordi Soriano Fradera is a Spanish physicist and Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Barcelona, where he leads the Neurophysics Group and serves as vice-director of the university’s Institute of Complex Systems (UBICS). He earned his PhD in condensed matter physics at the University of Barcelona before completing postdoctoral research in developmental biology in Germany and in neuroscience at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. For more than fifteen years, his group has developed in vitro neuronal cultures and biophysical models to study how connectivity and collective dynamics give rise to brain function, and how they break down in neurological disease. He has collaborated closely with medical teams on Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Sanfilippo, and Alzheimer’s disease, and coordinated research under the EU Horizon 2020 NEU-CHiP project on biological computing. In this InterDialogue, recorded in Soriano’s lab among live neuronal cultures and imaging equipment, we trace his path from studying fluid fronts in porous media as a condensed matter physicist to a twenty-year career in neurophysics. We discuss how his group engineers rat and human stem-cell-derived neuronal cultures to model the brain’s structural and functional connectivity and to serve as disease models for Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Sanfilippo, and Alzheimer’s, the prospects and limits of cell transplantation and personalized medicine, and why Soriano estimates a twenty-year horizon before such approaches reach the clinic. We also discuss his work on network damage, resilience, and criticality in neuronal cultures, the NEU-CHiP project’s attempt to train living neurons to perform computation, neuromorphic chips that mimic neurons in silicon, and a striking experiment in which donated human brain tissue was made to play back a melody fed to it through a robotic piano. We close by considering the ethical stakes of coupling neuronal cultures with robots and augmented-human technologies, Soriano’s efforts to help build neuroscience...

Over the short span of just 300 years, since the invention of modern physics, we have gained a deeper understanding of how our universe works on both small and large scales. Yet, physics is still very young and when it comes to using it to explain life, physicists struggle. Even today, we can’t really explain what the difference is between a living lump of matter and a dead one. But my colleagues and I are creating a new physics of life that might soon provide answers. More than 150 years ago, Darwin poignantly noted the dichotomy between what we understand in physics and what we observe in life – noting at the end of The Origin of Species “…whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved”. The importance of time Isaac Newton described a universe where the laws never change, and time is an immutable and absolute backdrop against which everything moves. Darwin, however, observed a universe where endless forms are generated, each changing features of what came before, suggesting that time should not only have a direction, but that it in some ways folds back on itself. New evolutionary forms can only arise via selection on the past. Presumably these two areas of science are describing the same universe, but how can two such diametrically opposite views be unified? The key to understanding why life is not explainable in current physics may be to reconsider our notions of time as the key difference between the universe as described by Newton and that of Darwin. Time has, in fact, been reinvented many times through the history of physics. Although Newton’s time was fixed and absolute, Einstein’s time became a dimension...