This article suggests eight high-level concepts that can promote convergence by identifying analogies across fields of science and engineering. CONSERVATION: Many properties are conserved, through symmetries, parity laws, and feedback-regulated stabilities in complex adaptive systems. INDECISION: Inconsistency, undecidability, uncertainty, chance, deterministic chaos, and similar concepts are fundamental principles in the dynamics of systems over time. CONFIGURATION: Detailed, dynamic structures of objects determine their properties, notably the unity of nature at the nanoscale. INTERACTION: Elements of a system influence each other, generating higher-level dynamics and other emergent phenomena. VARIATION: Statistical distributions of properties are caused by the combination of chance and divergent processes of interaction.
Evolution: Marked by drift, natural selection, and a trend toward greater complexity, evolution exploits variation to develop new configurations that compete through interactions.
Information: Scientific laws can be analyzed in terms of information content, and flow, while the doing of any science today relies heavily upon information technology. COGNITION: Mental or computational process is the dynamic aspect of information, fundamental to the human practice of science.