Self-Organised Criticality

When we studied equilibrium systems, we saw that many thermodynamic relations or laws could be derived by averaging over the unobserved microstates of the system. The resulting relations were thus emergent laws that are incredibly accurate for large systems. It is important to note, for contrasting with what follows below, that the macrosocpic laws derived in chapter(4) describe each macroscopic state. On the other hand, many complex systems in nature display regularities in a statistical description of their observable macrostates.