Brasília, November 19, 2003 (Agência Brasil - ABr) - For three days the city of Angra dos Reis, on the coast of Rio de Janeiro, will be the world center of physics. Beginning today, physicists from 46 countries are gathered at the Hotel do Frade for the international seminar "Tendencies and Perspectives in Extensive and Non-extensive Statistical Mechanics." The event is sponsored by the Brazilian Physics Research Center (CBPF), an institute of the Ministry of Science and Technology, and will bring together the chief specialists on the subject.

Among the experts who will be present in this area, one of the most renowned is Constantino Tsallis, a naturalized Brazilian of Greek origin responsible for a revolutionary theory of entropy. Tsallis, a researcher at the CBPF, proposes a new equation for entropy, a quantity that measures disorder or the lack of information at the microscopic level. His proposal was formulated in 1988 and has given rise to over 1000 studies and theses by approximately 700 scientists in 45 countries.

Tsallis's study has warranted complete chapters in graduate texts written by foreign authors and has already been used to study turbulences, such as those that occur during flights. The researcher, who was indicated by the Brazilian Academy of Science for the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics, now has his name associated with expressions like "Tsallis entropy," "Tsallis statistics," and analogous terms ordinarily found in the scientific literature. Many international meetings (in Japan, the US, Brazil, Argentina, and Italy) have been devoted exclusively to the theme. (DAS)