True concurrency - from C.A. Petri to Telecom and Systems Biology

Some circles, squares and arrows, plus some black dots moving along: that is all it takes to build a Petri net. These nets are a mathematical tool and model for dynamical systems generally considered to be “at home” in computer science. However, a great deal of the theory of Petri nets and of the concurrency (describing asynchronous parallel processes) which they involve, had been developed for and inspired by the understanding of physical processes, building upon principles from chemical reactions, and both relativistic and quantum physics.
It is fair to say that Petri nets are not only intuitive, but also fertile for many fields; in this talk, I will illustrate this in the contexts of physics, engineering, and biology, reflecting in some sort the evolution that the field has taken over the past 50 years.