The Sociothermodynamic Superhighway

Urban highways cut opportunities for social relationships, says study

Mar 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-03-urban-highways-opportunities-social-relationships.html

Highways were intended to shorten the commute to work and make traveling within the city easier.

"But this comes at a price, especially over short distances. If someone wants to cross a multi-lane highway, it takes a lot of effort. So highways connect over long distances, but divide over short ones."

via Complexity Science Hub Vienna: Luca Maria Aiello et al, Urban highways are barriers to social ties, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2408937122

https://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2408937122

Image credit: AI Art - Racetrack Alive - 2025

Urban inequality scaling throughout the ages: Ancient and modern cities show predictable elite wealth patterns

Mar 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-03-urban-inequality-scaling-ages-ancient.html

Don't forget the Santa Fe Institute mixup on this topic - about ten years ago they thought population density rises in tandem with wealth, according to scaling laws, but a few years ago that thought was revised to show that only the average rises, but if you break it down, there's less people with more money and more people with less money:

The researchers found that the same scaling relationships that appear to shape modern economic activity—in which cities grow richer and more productive as they get larger—may also shape the way wealth is concentrated at the top. In other words, the processes that make cities wealthy may also often make them unequal.

"It seems as if inequality isn't a side-effect of city living under particular cultural or economic conditions; it may be a built-in consequence of urban growth itself."

Scientists analyzed evidence from both ancient Roman and modern cities to see how wealth scales with city size. The data for Roman cities included numbers of monuments and counts of inscriptions dedicating monuments to elite patrons. Data for modern cities included counts of very tall buildings, as well as counts of billionaires per city. They then applied statistical scaling methods to test for mathematical relationships between city size and indicators of elite wealth.

via Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology: Parallel scaling of elite wealth in ancient Roman and modern cities with implications for understanding urban inequality, Nature Cities (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s44284-025-00213-1

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s44284-025-00213-1

Leibnizian Deformation

a parquet deformation

Philosophy in Science
The Deep And Suggestive Principles of Leibnizian Philosophy
Julian Barbour, The Harvard Review of Philosophy, XI 2003, pp45-56

"The most obvious thing about the universe in which we find ourselves is its structure." (^p45)

One cannot help wondering if modern science does not lack a key idea. Could there be some direct structure-creating principle that has hitherto escaped us?

Darwinian evolution, dynamical self-organization of structure, or the structure of the inflationary scenario in modern cosmology [add the preferential attachment law, otherwise known as "cumulative advantage"].

Barbour agrees with the arguments in quantum cosmology which define time as an emergent phenomenon (noted in his book, The End of Time, 2000).

Barbour is making attempt to connect these ideas (concerning quantum gravity) to Leibnizian philosophy:

To counter Newton’s notion of a preexisting absolute space in which all points are exactly identical, Leibniz asserted that space must be relative. Space, argued Leibniz, is nothing more than the order of coexisting things, which are “placed” solely by their positions relative to each other. (predating Einstein, circa 1715)

In his youth, Leibniz was “infected” by Decartes' absolute-minimum explanation of the universe, and subsequently found himself at odds with the question of how we can ever know anything from anything else without variety. There must be at least one other concept added to Descartes' theory.

Leibniz denied the independent existence of space and time. They were nothing but relations between things. Position in space and time could not be used as attributes to distinguish otherwise indistinguishable objects. He argued that any contingently existing thing must be described by its attributes.* Once one starts on the true identification of an actual thing, one must always end by giving a description of the entire universe.*

In the Monadology is the claim that the perceptions of any one monad — its defining attributes — are nothing more and nothing less than the relations it bears to all the other monads. The entire world is resolved into pure shared experience.*

notes:
*The Leibniz—Clarke Correspondence, ed. H. G. Alexander (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1956)
See especially the Correspondence with Arnauld reproduced in Philosophical Papers and Letters, eds. L. L. Leroy, D.Reidel, Dordrecht  (1969) and Leibniz: Philosophical Writings, eds. G. H. R. Parkinson and J. M. Dent (1973)

R. Descartes, The Principles of Philosophy (1644)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principles_of_Philosophy

G. Leibniz, Monadology (1714)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monadology