The wisdom of the swarm: physics and behaviour
Super-organisms solve complex physiological problems collectively, sans plan or planner, on scales much larger than the individual. Motivated by observations in the field and in the lab, I will describe our attempts to understand how different orders of social insects – termites, bees and ants – actively regulate their micro-environment by constructing and deconstructing complex functional architectures. By linking physics and behavior on multiple scales using local sensing and action mediated by global fields, these examples point to a kind of embodied intelligence. To synthesize these complex collective behaviors in-vitro, I will close by describing our experiments using simple robots that perhaps sharpen some questions raised a long time ago by Tinbergen and others.
Date:
10 June 2023, 15:00 (Saturday, 7th week, Trinity 2023)
Venue:
Beecroft Building
Venue Details:
Simpkins Lee
Speaker:
Professor L. Mahadevan (Harvard University)
Organising department:
Rudolf Peierls Centre for Theoretical Physics
Organiser contact email address:
wykehamea@physics.ox.ac.uk
Booking required?:
Required
Booking url:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-inaugural-willis-lamb-lecture-series-tickets-626133511187
Audience:
Public
Editor:
Cecillia Chan
