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Critical contributions from an unusual physicist
Peter Gywnne
FromPhysics World
September 1996
© IOP Publishing Ltd 2009
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10Physics World

September 1996

Critical contributions froman unusual physicist
Eugene Stanley has applied the tools of theoretical physics to the heart and lungs, thesearch patterns of albatrosses, company growth and much more. Peter Gywnne finds
out what these diverse topics have in common
His academic qualifications are solely inphysics, but H Eugene (Gene) Stanley has
always been interested in worlds beyond
the narrow confines of his chosen subject.
His appointments at Boston University
indicate his breadth of interests: he isdirector of the Center for Polymer
Studies, professor of physics and professorof physiology at the medical school.
Equally indicative of the 55-year-old
Stanley's scientific breadth is a random
selection of his publications. It includes
papers on the application of physics principles to the growth of companies, thebehaviour of the heartbeat and the lung,metastable water, and the structure ofDNA. His team's most recent contribution to Nature focuses on the flight patterns of albatrosses.
In pursuing such a broad range of interests, Stanley has followed a muse that goesbeyond the accepted boundaries ofphysics. "I have always been fascinated bydiscovering new things about the world
around me," he says. That interest hashelped him to form academic allianceswith people working in molecular biology,
medicine, economics and other fields distant from physics.
To those alliances he has brought anability to dream up penetrating ideas.
"One of Professor Stanley's widely appreciated talents is coming up with highly
original ideas that have opened up new
subfields of physics," says Antonio
Coniglio of the University of Naples.
Stanley has also shown a marked enthusiasm for pushing those ideas to the limit.
"To some extent, he's always been at the
cutting edge, and to some extent he's
pushed the border a little further than others might," says Wolf Prize winner Michael
Fisher of the University of Maryland.
Stanley reached his state of academic
ubiquity via critical phenomena, thephysics subfield that he helped to develop,with Fisher and others, more than twodecades ago. The field deals with systems
near their critical points. But it is moregeneral than that restriction might indicate, says Stanley, "because it is turningout that a lot of systems are in fact near
critical points".
The conceptual framework is scaling the fact that phenomena look different ondifferent scales. Scaling, Stanley explains,applies to almost any relevant variable.
"The key thing about avalanches andstockmarkets," he says, "is that there is no
intrinsic scale to the problem" - as

opposed to a pendulum, which has an
intrinsic scale in the form of its period.
Avalanches, for example, appear to be a
totally random, unquantifiable events. But
scaling concepts permit scientists to gain
some understanding of them. "Even whensomething is as apparently erratic as anavalanche, one can say something about it.
One can make simple models and get ahandle on these very complex problems,"
he asserts.
Stanley has always been more than ablinkered physicist. After receiving hisbachelor's degree in physics fromWesleyan University in Connecticut in1962, he spent a year as a Fulbright fellow
at the University of Cologne, studying

Wide-scale interests - Eugene Stanley

experimental biophysics with Nobel laureate Max Delbriick. Stanley planned to do
his PhD in biophysics, but Delbriick persuaded him that he should concentrate ona foundation subject. So he obtained hisPhD in solid-state theory from Harvard
University, where he worked underanother Nobel laureate, John van Vleck.
During and after his PhD he worked primarily with Thomas Kaplan - at theLincoln Laboratory, an institution run by
the Massachusetts Institute of Technologythat was heavily involved in defence work.
The institution gave two important boosts
to Stanley's academic career. It intro-duced him to the emerging subfield ofcritical phenomena and it helped him todefine his working style.
"What happened there really changed
how I've run my lab over the last 30years," he recalls. "There, I really learned
how to do science." For example, he had
multiple scientific mentors at the Lincoln
Lab. Since then, he says, he has tried toensure that he is never the sole mentor of
his students.
By 1969 Stanley was beginning to makea name for himself in critical phenomena
and was receiving offers of faculty posts.
He chose to move to MIT, where hestayed for the next seven years. Duringthat time, says Fisher, "he attracted a large
proportion of the best students". But
MIT did not award him tenure.
"There's no single reason why I left
MIT," he recalls, "but a lot had to do withresponding too much to other peoples'pressures. I tried to learn too much toofast." Adding to his problems were hisanti-establishment
activities, which
included demonstrating against theVietnam War and in favour of the releaseof Soviet Jews, and disrupting anAmericanAssociationfortheAdvancement of Science meeting - "not agood way to behave if you want tenure atMIT," he muses. According to Fisher,
Stanley's departure "was a big mistake byMIT, which Gene has shown since by hiswork".
He ended up physically, if not spiritually, close to MIT: in the physics department of Boston University, just acrossCharles River. From there Stanley has run
an exemplary programme in scaling andcritical phenomena for the past 20 years.
"I think the work that has come out of hisgroup has had a lot of impact," says
Fereydoon Family of Emory University, afellow critical phenomena physicist.
The concept of scale invariance issummed up in the Guttenberg-Richtergraph. This plots the logarithm of thenumber of events (such as avalanches,earthquakes and crashes in the stockmarket) against the log of the magnitude ofsuch events. These graphs turn out to beremarkably linear.
Scientifically, Stanley says, such study
tells something about the phenomenon.
The plots also have practical value in, forexample, the insurance and building
industries. "We don't predict when anevent like an earthquake will happen
because it is random. We predict thePhysics Worldchance that it will happen," explains
Stanley. "There are a zillion problems like
this, ranging from the stockmarket to lotsof other things that are scale-free phenomena."
Critical phenomena differ from chaos
and fractals. Chaos involves systems,
almost always deterministic, for which thetime evolution depends very sensitively on
the initial conditions. Fractals are primarily random rather than deterministic.
Critical phenomena are a subset of fractals, in that everything near a critical pointis a fractal, but not all fractals are necessarily associated with critical points.
However, Stanley points out, "it would bewrong to give the impression that criticalphenomena are just a tiny subset of fractals, since the big advances in critical phenomena came 10-20 years before those infractals".
Stanley's early work applied criticalphenomena techniques to percolation,polymers and diffusion. It is in recentyears that he has strayed further from conventional physics. In one project, Stanleyand cardiologist A L Goldberger haveapplied scaling concepts to the humanheartbeat. Analysis of data collected byGoldberger's team at Harvard Medical
School indicates that the healthy humanheart beats at a continuously variable rate,with the interval between successive
beats changing by as much as 0.1 s.
Intriguingly, and counter-intuitively,
patients with heart disease show less of
this type of variation. "This variability isterribly important in understanding thedesign of the heart," says Stanley. "Thedifferent scaling behaviour in health anddisease must relate to the underlying
dynamics of the heartbeat."
In a similar fashion, Stanley andMichael Salinger of Boston University's
School of Management applied scaling
behaviour to the growth of companies.
They developed a model in which "theprobability of a company's growthdepends on its past as well as its present
sales accounts." The model applies tocompanies that manufacture all types ofproducts, suggesting that organizationalstructure, rather than production-relatedfactors, has more impact on growth.
Family warns that although these mostrecent studies are quite interesting, they
represent a work in progress. "It will taketime to see their real significance and theireffect in areas like cardiology and thestockmarket. Nevertheless," he adds, "Ifeel it's the job of a physicist to look at how
new findings can be applied to otherareas".
Gene Stanley and his colleagues at
Boston University are undertaking thattask with more intensity than most. As scientists, "we are discoverers of what's out
there, like Christopher Columbus," hesays. "My guess is that this type of work
will emerge as one of the big ideas of science - but it probably won't be appreciated for another 25 years."•IN BRIEF
Cluster scientists could sue
Scientists working on the ill-fated Cluster
mission, which was destroyed when theAriane 5 rocket exploded in June, have threatened to sue those responsible if they are notprovided with a free and safe launch for anyreplacement. Without a free launch, theyargue, any replacement for the mission tostudy the interaction between the Earth's
magnetosphere and the solar wind would beprohibitively expensive. The European Space
Agency is responsible for Ariane but handed
over execution of the programme to theFrench Centre Nationale d'Etudes Spatiales.

According to ESA's inquiry into the loss ofAriane 5, the failure was due to specificationand design errors in the guidance software. "Itis clear that negligence occurred in the Ariane
programme which led to the destruction of
the launcher and of Cluster," says Andre
Balogh of Imperial College, London, principal investigator for the magnetometers on
Cluster. A decision on the future - if any - of
the Cluster mission will be taken in
November. If it is negative, Cluster's spacescientists may bring the lawsuit. "We are hoping the agency will do the right thing - whichis to recover part of their cornerstone mission," says Balogh.

Norwegian rocket fails
Two Norwegian atmospheric research rockets
were destroyed shortly after launch from thenorthern island of Andeya at the end of July.
Developed by the University of Tromse andprivate Norwegian companies, the lightweightrockets were expected to revolutionize atmospheric research through their low cost andtheir high speed. The NOK 150 000 (about£15 000) rockets travel at ten times the speedof traditional rockets.
Apparently, heavy vibrations caused a radio
component failure or a cable fracture 2 seconds after launch, when the second rocket hadreached a height of 2 km. Scientists from
Tromso's Northern Lights Observatory had
expected to receive valuable data from therockets during the 90 seconds that they shouldhave spent at the edge of the atmosphere.
The Andoya base shot to fame in January
1995 when a rocket launched in the directionof Svalbard triggered a nuclear alert in Russia.

Japan's know-how
Japan has the most inventive scientists,
according tofigureson the latest international
trends in R&D from the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD). The "inventiveness coefficient" the number of patent applications per 10 000people - was 26.6 in Japan in 1993, comparedwith 4.4 in Germany, 3.9 in the US and 3.2 inthe UK.
Japan also spends a greater proportion ofSeptember 1996

its Gross Domestic Product on R&D than any
other country. It ploughed back 2.90% in1994, compared with only 2.54% in the US,
2.38% in France, 2.33% in Germany and2.19% in the UK. However, in absoluteterms, the US leads the way. It spent$169.0bn on R&D in 1994, more than Japan(875.2bn), Germany (S37.4bn), France(S26.5bn) and the UK (822.6bn).
A different picture emerges, however, when
R&D measured at constant prices is considered. In these terms, R&D spending fell by
1.0% in Japan in 1994. There were also falls inGermany (down 1.0%), the US (down 0.5%)
and France (down 0.3%).The OECD blamed
the general economic downturn for the figures. The UK registered significant growth in1994 - it spent 3.5% more on R&D at constant prices than the year before. However,the UK still lags behind its competitors interms of the amount spent on R&D perperson. It spent just 8387 per head in 1994,
compared with $457 in France, 8459 inGermany, 8601 in Japan and 8648 in the US.

Ultraviolet cut-off
After more than 100 000 observations madeover 18 years, resulting in 500 doctoral dissertations and 3500 papers in refereed journals, the International Ultraviolet Explorer
satellite is to cease operation at the end of
this month.
The satellite has a 45 cm ultraviolet telescope for spectroscopic observations in the115-320 nm waveband. Launched in 1978,
its expected lifetime was only three years.
Until recently, it was jointly funded by NASA,the European Space Agency (ESA) and theUK Particle Physics and Astronomy ResearchCouncil. NASA decided to terminate its
funding of the project a year ago, and ESA
can no longer afford to make up thedifference due to budget pressures on its
science programme.

Ex-advisers seek work
A group of scientists and engineers familiarwith the US corridors of power has formed aprivate company to provide advice and assessments on a range of science and technology
issues. The Washington Advisory Group willseek clients from private corporations, universities and non-US government agencies. Itwill assess the quality, organization and effectiveness of R&D, and provide advice on new
business opportunities that stem fromadvances in science and technology.
"In our work we have found that scienceand technology represents an increasingly
bottom line issue," explains Robert White,former president of the National Academy ofEngineering and ex-administrator of theNational, who is president of the new group.
The group's fellows include three former US
presidential science advisers - Allan Bromley,
Edward David and Frank Press. Also on thebooks are Robert Frosch, Erich Bloch andAlan Schriesheim. m w n n innim
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