Speakers:

Abstract:Middle school thrusts Newton’s laws on students in today’s education system. Yet such is the power of nature that she can throw up surprises in the visible world where no one doubts that all the answers are hidden in the three laws of Newton. This lecture will discuss some of the well understood but nonetheless striking phenomena, some of the still debated ones and some where Newton’s laws say that the answer is chaotic.

Speakers:

Abstract:The phenomenon of synchronisation in which a largenumber of microscopic units spontaneously organisethemselves into displaying cooperative behaviour plays animportant role in a wide class of systems of physical, chemical and biological origin. The nature of emergent collective behaviours of moving interacting physical agents like oscillators is a long-standing open issue in many branches of science. This calls for studies on the control of synchronisation and the degree of order in a collection of moving noisy oscillators. We address this by constructing a generic physical theory for activephase fluctuations in a collection of large number of nearly phase-coherent moving oscillators. We show that the interplay between the active effects and the mobility of the oscillators leads to a variety of phenomena, ranging from full or partial synchronisation to desynchronisation of the oscillator phases.