Events

Date: 6 March 2025   Time: 13:00 - 14:00

Location: MB-503

New experiences continuously reshape our lives, whether through encounters with novel ideas, social interactions, or technological advancements. While some of these experiences occur randomly, many unfold through intricate chains of correlation and causation, forming a dynamic interplay between past and future novelties. Throughout history, innovation has simultaneously opened new opportunities and disrupted existing paradigms, challenging our fundamental drive to anticipate the future. A key principle underlying this process is the adjacent possible—the set of ideas, structures, and artifacts that lie just beyond the current state of knowledge and practice. My work contributes to the formalization of this concept within a mathematical framework. After tracing the historical treatment of novelty emergence, I will introduce a precise mathematical formulation of the adjacent possible and explore its implications across diverse domains, from social and technological evolution to the apparent emergence of singularities in macroevolutionary dynamics.