The Maximum empower principle

About

Self-organization of the systems follows the complexity of its structural configuration, and is the ultimate feature that allows the system to survive, adapt and evolve. What is the principle that rules how self-organization works? In this lecture, I will introduce what is sometimes called "the 4th principle of thermodinamics", that is, the Maximum Empower Principle, which follows the same line of reasoning that addressed the maximization of power as the driving force for living systems organization. The empower, that is the flow of emergy characterizing a system operation, is addressed as the real quantity which a system maximizes in its operation and evolution. In particular, self-organization tends to develop network connections that use energy resources -and so emergy- in feedback actions to aid the process of getting more resources or using them more efficiently.

Francesco Gonella short bio

PhD in Physics at University of Padova, Italy. Excéllence Postdoctorale at the Université Laval, Québec City, Canada. Since 2016, Full Professor of Physics at the Department of Molecular Sciences and Nanosystems of the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. After twenty years of activity as an experimental physicist (study of nanostructured glasses, artistic glasses and glasses for energy technologies), ten years ago I have shifted my interests to Systems Thinking and Emergy Analysis, applied to the study of the functioning and the integrated sustainability of systems. I am Director of the "International School on Emergy Accounting'', and member of the Executive Council of the International Society for the Advancement in Emergy Research. I teach Sustainability and Systems Thinking at the Beijing Normal University in China as a high-end foreign expert, and keep courses on the same topics at the Universities of Turin and Catania in Italy. I was Visiting Professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, for two years, and Visiting Researcher at Vanderbilt University (Nashville,…