What seem like fundamental discoveries for understanding nature
Website - Synapse9.com  Blog - Synapse9.com/signals

A scientific method for using information gaps to study the locally creative processes nature uses to change form.

• individual system learning processes in air currents
• organized thermal molecular motion with energy storage and release
• mathematics of system continuity in discontinuous information
• continual growth in any process violates the conservation laws of physics
• stages of natural system development implied by the conservation laws
• punctuated genetic evolution may occur by a dynamic learning process
• stabilizing economies requires ending wealth concentration by compounding
• some useful ways to learn how the learning systems around us work
• some useful ways to design for an environment of learning systems
• errors of ecology and economy in representing learning systems with equations
• danger of adding to internal conflict by letting outside pressure control growth systems

More detail 6/17/06 9/7/08

• 1978  Two kinds of organized molecular motion
  - A spontaneous energy storage and release in a chemically neutral fluid.  I never mentioned it explicitly until now, because it's a little uncommon and I've had no way to explain it, but it's the implicit subject of my enduringly most popular web page.   airbox_.htm
  - Air currents emerge as systems of organized molecular motion for energy transfer,  required to allow passive energy transfer by movement within a fluid,
  - Systemization as revealing the presence of a gradient.
  - A Self-organizing air current networks may be exploited to postpone the onset of turbulence.
• 1979 Time as a process, not a variable location on a scale
  - Equations of change use time as a variable on a scale that can't depict the continual complex processes of change that are the actual engines of time. the "Unhidden Pattern of Events" offers a story board sequence of evolutionary processes to begin another approach for exploring the individual event processes.
  -  Physical things and processes are invariably complete, detailed, particular and definite in their individual occurrence, as far as anyone can tell, and all uncertainty might well be just a feature of our information.   It appears that only our ability to predict and understand them is vague and statistical.   Considering them as individual and particular rather than an instance of an average occurrence with error leads to very different and productive questions.  
   
• 1979 Emergent systems can be studied as complete continuities of organizational development from beginning to end, 'whole events'
  - Growth trends usually locate the intensification of local networks of emergent complex systems or their decay.    The four signs of change, iidd.htm and later version 'chapters'
  - Diminishing returns on investment is a primary indicator of limits of systemization and approaching ends of development
  - Compounding mechanisms for growth systems are increasingly unstable, and always end their own operation by continually changing the network's scale to collide with its internal or external environmental limits.  Compounding responds to limits by being changed by them.
  - That relatively sudden organizational change is triggered either from inside or outside of the system network and can lead to a range of outcomes from stabilization to sudden disordering.
• 1979 Diminishing returns as  direction of progress is a primary sign of terminal limits
  - Economic growth will be self-destabilizing because stability requires monetary growth based on producing expanding opportunities from diminishing opportunities.
  - Emergent economies that survive end their growth and compounding mechanism by diverting their surpluses to completing and running the system without compounding returns.   That switch may be in response to either an internal or external signal or constraint, usually of some diminishing return.
• 1982 Deduction that whole system models that allow growth require an end of compounding returns to stabilize without disrupting systems that produce returns
• 1985 SGSR papers on directed opportunity and limits of feedback
• 1993 Continuity & Divergence Principle, that beginnings require local divergent processes consistent with the conservation laws in having limited rates of change involving processes on multiple scales.
• 1999 Divergent developmental processes in plankton speciation
• 1999 Features of Derivative Continuity in Natural Process  IJPRAI paper:  derivative reconstruction & step variance statistical test to rule out random walk in time sequence data.
• 2007 Roughness suppression test for underlying continuity in irregular data
• 2008 General theory of individualism
  Conservation of change in complex systems and organizational development processes as guides to learning about complex systems, "little bangs" and a theorem of continuity and divergence, solidified with perspective of complex systems as learning processes with emergent network cells of relationships that actively explore their environments, applications & methods.  (implicit in 1978 "Unhidden Pattern of Events" and other early work.  A synthesis of 30 years in the course of two years, a critical reinvention of sustainability theory, writing several sets of teaching tools, absorbing very numerous books, a dozen conferences on related emerging disciplines, unusually voluminous and diverse conversations by mail and email and piles of notes, then dropping out because not explaining it right isn't the problem...)
• 2008 Stability in ecosystems is caused by the resourceful learning of individuals Cosmos paper.
• 2008 The specific reductionisms of science preventing its study of life.
  The functional disinformation of self-consistent models for representing environments with inconsistent and independently learning parts individually responding to each other and their environments.  The divergent physical processes that are connected by environments without predetermination.   Confirming the objection of Robert Rosen that excluding divergent series from the tools of science prevents mathematical science from exploring life with the theorem of continuity and divergence .  
• 2009 Traced an error to H T Odum in representing businesses as systems without people to error of ecology in reducing systems to their abstract measures, and misrepresenting the impacts of businesses and economic growth, and the whole range of issues for systems with independently learning parts on which our lives depend. 
• 2009 The role of considering perception (consciousness) to be reality, causing people to primarily arrive at their information from other information, of unknown origin, permitting perceived reality to wander, settled only by mutual agreement, seeming to be be the source of the extensive but highly erratic human predilection for magical thinking as well as the mysterious absence of connections between schools of thought, even for scientists considering the same subject matter.
• 2010 A standard method for calibrating physical measures of complex distributed systems with indentifying their functional boundaries and exhaustive search within those boundaries.

Some other fairly solid results in various specialties:  (old list)

• Gamma Ray bursts have intricate detail, and are apparently the result of cosmic implosions, most likely from black hole formation. 
  --note that this conclusion was reached by shape analysis long before astrophysicists reached the same conclusion by other methods.
• If there ever was an economic growth constant , it preceded 1880. The appearance of a growth constant since then has apparently been just an artifact of the statistical method used, since, with only one exception, the rate of economic growth has been in continual decline throughout the history of the statistical record. The statistical appearance of a sustained growth rate comes from a combination of short term variability, and the presence of one significant rise.
• Biological evolution sometimes occurs by a growth process rather than just following a random drift or varying environmental pressures.  This shows that the gaps in the record of evolution could be explained by the kind of complex system development process which accounts for system organization elsewhere.
• Changes in earth surface temperature and rates of economic activity (producing CO2) over the past 100 years exhibit differing dynamics that suggest that other factors have been dominant in climate change.  Over the past 30 years their accelerations of change appear linked in appearing to have several matching turning points, though the directions of each trend is still quite different.
  -- this is dated but worth considering in refining the understanding of the link