Principium Luxuriæ: Multiscale Thermodynamics to Living and Non-Living Complex Systems

Patricio Venegas-Aravena is a Chilean scientist who is in the final stage of his doctorate at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and who has published 12 articles to date. He initially dedicated himself to studying preseismic processes along with the simulation of heterogeneous seismic ruptures that generate spatial variability in strong ground motion. Trying to study pre-earthquake physics he became interested in the generation of cracks (microscopic damage) that occurs in rocks that are uniaxially stressed prior to macroscopic failure. He noticed that the energy dissipation that took place through these cracks was not homogeneous, but rather occurred at increasingly larger scales. Due his large interest in reading and reviewing updated non-fiction books, he began to think that other systems could have this particularity. Therefore, he generalized this fact to try to describe other multiscale systems. Finally, he found that many systems in physics, astrophysics, biology or even sociology could be reinterpreted as multiscale dissipative mechanisms, which led him to think that there may be a principle in nature that he called Principium Luxuriæ.