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Christopher LaSota
Visiting
Assistant Professor of Physics
Ph.D., Physics -- The College of William and Mary, 1999 |
Directory information
- E-mail: lasotac (at) kenyon . edu
- Phone: 740-427-5466
- FAX: 740-427-5573
- Office: Hayes 214
Currently teaching (2007-08)
- PHYS 130 – General Physics I (Fall)
- PHYS 340 – Classical Mechanics (Fall)
- PHYS 219 – Complex Systems in Scientific
Computing (Spring)
- PHYS 245 – Oscillations and
Waves (Spring)
- PHYS 246 – Oscillations and
Waves Laboratory (Spring)
Office Hours (Spring,
2008)
- Mon / Wed / Fri : 11:00 a.m. – 12 noon
- Tue / Thur : 12 noon – 1 p.m.
- Please make an appointment if these
times conflict with your schedule.
- (click here to
see my schedule this semester)
- OR....check to see if my office door is open.
If so, chances are good that I can help you.
Research interests
Complex
Systems
Many physical phenomena have been modeled successfully using
the idea that what appears at first to be complex behavior is often the result
of the identical application of simple rules to a large numbers of autonomous
actors in a system. In such systems, there usually exist certain
definable quantitative parameters related to the rules of the system. The
value of such a parameter can be used to govern the character of the
large-scale behavior of the entire system. One range of values will
produce global order or simple cyclic behavior, while another range of values
results in chaos and unpredictable long-term behavior. However, in a
narrow range of values between the other two, very intricate and surprising
things occur. In fact, it appears that most of the complexity we see in
the natural world is a consequence of what happens when a system is
poised between order and chaos
Ontogeny
in Living and Artificial Systems
The growth of a single cell into a functional multi-cellular organism (ontogeny) is probably the most fascinating example of self-organization and emergent behavior known. However, many of the structural and dynamic features of biological systems are also seen in economies, ecologies, human societies, and other complex systems. This suggests that the general principles responsible for self-organization and complexity in living organisms might well be universal, and not uniquely dependent on the details of the underlying biochemistry. If we can discover such principles, it may become possible to engineer ontogeny in artificial systems. I'm currently using random boolean network models of the genomic regulatory circuitry of cells to examine their potential for reproducing the main qualitative features seen in real biological development.
