[a May 07 draft of general principles, less technical than the physics of conserved change, the Law of "little bangs" and mathematical principles for continuity & divergence it comes from]
The first principle of individual events
1. Organizational change requires a continuous process.
A clear intuitive reason is that organizational change is inherently accumulative, meaning that a succession of steps is needed, and change from one organization to another can't take place instantaneously. It's developmental. To change from one thing to another requires steps on a path going from one to the other, continuity. In doing that, every step also takes steps, to the limits of observation.
1.a Determining if organizational change took place by looking for the steps taken appears to be a very reliable method of classifying change.
The perception that organizational change sometimes appears suddenly is usually easily discovered to come from not paying attention as all the little steps of some new organizational state were falling into place. That's the usual explanation for why 'emergent' properties seem to appear out of nowhere. You just can't use an emergent property to measure the emergence of that property, you need some other one.
1.b Keystone events tend to be either not organizational or invisible and serve as exceptions that prove the rule rather than break the rule.
Organization in nature does rarely develop as for a 'keystone' being put into place, and the organization of the whole structure seems to formed at the instant of the one piece falling into place. One phenomenon that gives that appearance is the one the creationists make a lot of, the seemingly impossibility of imagining the path by which a mutual dependency develops. If you look you can usually find the path.
One important place where that kind of organization appears frequently is the implied seed organizing patterns of growth systems, that imperceptible beginning pattern and design of the 'growth idea', 'the magic bean', etc. It's speculative though, and observable change from one form of organization to another very reliably takes many progressive steps in a complex process.
2. For organizational change to begin or end requires
growth and decay
Steps of change can't themselves be either instantaneous, nor infinite, and so neither can their successive changes, the difference between steps and the difference between step differences. That means an infinite succession of small increases in increasing rates is required, which sounds illogical, but you can't get around it logically, and the evidence is prolific that that's exactly how nature does it.
2.a to begin and end a flow on a gradient requires the development and decay of a process of flowing
The beginning and end of a flow of energy or any other conserved or unconserved quantity also requires growth and decay of the process by which the flow occurs. An alternate proof of this principle follows from the conservation laws and the speed of light providing a calculus proof of the continuity of energy flows, and the implication that unconserved processes still require energy.
It it probably important to not that the derivative rates of change of a conserved quantity are themselves subject to continuity but not conserved.
2.b a growth process is the evolution of a complex network
Because all the steps of change don't happen at once they need to communicate in order to be connected steps. The evidence is quite consistent that where there is evidence of scale changing developmental progression that complex systems that can be importantly represented by their central networks of relationships are present and identifiable.
3. All organization has a limiting rate of change at which it breaks down in its natural form of turbulence due to exceeding internal response time limits.
'Chaos' has been mathematically defined as a highly ordered process of repeating fixed rules in a way that produces highly varied and unpredictable results. How natural organization breaks down in 'chaos' when changing faster that it's internal sub-systems can respond to is different, 'things going out of control' rather than 'things displaying complex pattern'. Sub-systems have inherent response times and rates of change can inherently exceed them, bringing about a disordering of the process. I think that's what fluid motion turbulence is, as well as human and other natural system learning and communication turbulence.
The above statements refer to physical things using natural language categories, and as such, stand to be refined, but I think probably not contradicted.