This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Perfection is overrated—at least when it comes to complex systems like the power grid, food webs and advanced materials. For decades, scientists generally assumed that networks function most reliably when their individual components are as similar as possible.
But real-world networks are rarely uniform. Generators in a power grid, neurons in a brain, animals in a food web and components in a material all differ in ways that scientists traditionally treated as imperfections. Now, Northwestern University physicists are overturning that long-held assumption.
In a new study, the scientists developed a mathematical framework that identifies when these differences—a form of variation known as disorder—can actually make a system more stable. The team found that many physical, engineered and biological complex systems can become more stable when their components, or the interactions among them, are different. Rather than treating variation as a flaw, the findings suggest scientists and engineers could harness deliberately designed differences to build more robust power grids, architected materials and other interconnected systems.
The work also could help explain why disorder is so prevalent in natural networks, including neural, biological and ecological systems. The study is published in the journal Science. The researchers also developed a website that allows users to visualize how the framework works.
By changing various parameters, users can watch network components interact with one another, synchronize and organize into patterns. "Previous studies found a growing number of cases in which disorder (also called heterogeneity, irregularity or asymmetry) across a network's nodes can actually improve stability and desirable behavior," said Northwestern's Adilson Motter, who led the work. "We have seen this in important real-world systems, including power grids, metamaterials and brain computation.
But we didn't know how widespread this effect was or which kinds of systems could benefit from it. Our new study answers those questions, explains why these differences can improve stability and even reveals why scientists overlooked this effect for so long." An expert in complex systems, Motter is the Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and director of the Center for Network Dynamics.
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