BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

TIME DIMENSIONS 1)

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The different period lengths of different sub processes which take place in a complex system.

Their interconnections produce a very complicated trajectory for the global process which may look totally random, while in reality it consists of a number of superposed and intertwined time curves.

The analysis of these latter is however tricky, since it depends either of the hunches of the analyser or of Fourier analysis, which allows for any kind of decomposition, significant or spurious.

Most of our evaluations are based on a strictly linear perception of the time-flow corresponding to some elementary process (a watch!), or a complex one artificially thus reduced. Even nonlinearity is many times perceived as reducible to lawful regularity. We have scant appreciation of the long-term accumulations of effects and the possible catastrophic (i.e. discontinuous) changes they may bring along: "The last straw that broke the camel's back".

We thus need to learn that we may face unsuspected long-term consequences of our doings, or that others may experiment them, and in some cases, make us pay for it.

It is possible to speak of "short", "medium", or "long term", which appear effectively in many statistical senses related to a great variety of processes. However "short", "medium" or "long" may have very different meanings accordingly to the type of process which is observed and the considered span of time.

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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