A single mathematical ratio determines when everything from a biological cell to the entire Earth's carbon cycle will suffer a total collapse.
April 25, 2026
Original Paper
Assembly, Dissipation, and the Kinetic Foundations of Collapse in Complex Adaptive Systems
SSRN · 6624179
The Takeaway
Complex systems fail when the rate of building new structures exceeds the environment's ability to clean up the resulting thermodynamic waste. This new framework, called the Assembly-Dissipation Ratio, provides a universal rule for predicting when a system is moving toward a crash. It suggests that collapse is not a random accident but a predictable result of entropy buildup. Whether it is a neural network becoming overloaded or a planet's climate reaching a tipping point, the math remains the same. Understanding this ratio gives us a concrete way to measure the health and stability of the most important systems in our lives.
From the abstract
The Capacity-Load Mismatch (CLM) framework, developed across the preceding four papers in this series (Rosen, 2026a, 2026b, 2026c, 2026d), has established that complex adaptive systems fail through tempo-weighted excess rather than through scarcity. Across substrates as different as algal photosystems, neural networks, interpersonal bandwidth, and planetary carbon cycles, the same pattern has recurred: identical loads produce survival or collapse depending on the rate at which they arrive. What