Erice Next 2004

There is increasing evidence that a large class of complex, usually nonequilibrium, phenomena in different fields such as for instance physics, chemistry, geophysics, biophysics and econophysics, share similar dynamical and structural properties. Such phenomena include self-organization, metastability, anomalous relaxation, aging, glassy states, amorphous clustering, non-Gaussian distributions, non-Markovian processes, mesoscopic dissipation, scale-invariant growth, among others. The aim of the meeting is to emphasize common features that could reveal unifying concepts within a general theoretical framework.