Abstract
The importance of our discovery of the coupled-pendulums case of self-organized criticality was immediately obvious to us. An open dissipative system had naturally organized itself into a critical scale-free state with avalanches of all sizes and all durations. The statistics of the avalanches follow the Gutenberg-Richter power law. There were small events and large events following the same laws. We had discovered a simple model for complexity in nature.
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Bak, P. (1996). The Sandpile Paradigm. In: How Nature Works. Copernicus, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-5426-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-5426-1_3
Publisher Name: Copernicus, New York, NY
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