From fundamental particles to the cosmos

What are the building blocks of space, time and matter? Can we understand the mind-boggling variation in properties emerging when Lego is played with billions of fundamental particles, atoms, molecules and little chunks of materials? These questions are amongst the deepest, and the scientists asking them do research into emergence.

The newly formed consortium wants to understand emergence at all scales: from the terribly tiny to the cosmologically colossal. The goal is the discovery of the general laws of emergence, written in the language of mathematics. In this journey spanning sixty-orders of magnitude, the scientists are joined by citizen-scientists, artists, school-kids, and cool cocktail-mixologists.

The consortium will run for five years, and will use the funding to employ 16 PhD students and 4 postdocs across the Netherlands. Armas and UvA-IoP physicist Mark Golden form the team that runs the consortium. The research will be centered on three pillars: mathematics, quantum gravity and cosmology, and matter, the last spanning from neutron stars though quantum materials to living matter. The consortium also includes a large societal engagement programme with large scale Emergence Festivals, Science and Cocktails events, an art/science collaboration programme, as well as a citizen science gaming platform for emergence. Application of the insights from the fundamental research activities will be tested in a research project with Statistics Netherlands (CBS) on emergent social phenomena. A pilot PhD PAL (personal assistant of the teacher) programme will give the PhD students first experience in enthusing school kids with their expert knowledge, while teaching in high schools.

Research on Routes by Consortia

‘Emergence at all Scales’ is one of nine consortia that have received funding for research within the Research on Routes by Consortia (ORC) programme line of the Dutch Research Agenda (NWA). In these projects, researchers work together with knowledge partners and civil society organisations. This ensures a combination of many different areas of expertise.

With the consortium, principal investigator Jay Armas builds on his previous initiatives around the phenomenon of emergence, in particular the Dutch Institute for Emergent Phenomena, which with this grant will be established at the national level. Armas is also well known for the Science and Cocktails series of events, combining scientific lectures with media, art and dry ice cocktails for a broad audience. Fitting very well within the NWA goals, Emergence at all Scales aims to reach and involve a similarly broad audience.

Besides the Institute of Physics at the University of Amsterdam, partners in Emergence at all Scales are: Freudenthal Institute, ICLON, IMC Weekendschool, Kyiv Academic University, New Scientist NL, AMOLF, NIKHEF, CBS (Statistics Netherlands), Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Stichting InScience, Stichting Paradiso Amsterdam, Technische Universiteit Delft, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, The Science and Cocktails Foundation (Denemarken), Universiteit Leiden, Universiteit Utrecht and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.