This essay is the fourth installment in the series on dreams and phase transitions. It turns the metaphor operational. Having established that instability is the main symptom of impending second-order ...

Based on fractal patterns in neurons, researchers believe our brains exist at or near a state called criticality where they're extremely close to shifting from one state of matter to another. They ...

A group of mathematicians has shown that at critical moments, a symmetry called rotational invariance is a universal property across many physical systems. For more than 50 years, mathematicians have ...