On the Origin of Universal Patterns

The most comprehensive result of scientific inquiry across disciplines is that data, irrespective of origin, display skewed distributions, sigmoid curves, and power laws as well as oscillations and, at times, chaos. While mathematical models and computer simulations can be made to reproduce these ubiquitous patterns of nature, science is not only about modeling and mimicking the data but making sense of it. We argue that the ubiquitous patterns follow from the least-time consumption of free energy. These natural processes can be described by the many-body theory of open systems, i.e., nonequilibrium statistical physics for quantized systems. This theory, also known as the second law of thermodynamics, explains the arrow of time in terms of flows of quanta as well as non-determinate and path-dependent evolution that yields the scale-free patterns.