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

BIFURCATION AS AN IRREVERSIBLE PHENOMENON 2)

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I. PRIGOGINE and P.M. ALLEN write: "When bifurcation occurs, then stability of the existing state of the system breaks down, allowing the amplification of some small random fluctuation to occur and to carry the system off to one of the possible, new branches of solution".

And "… nonlinear interactions can give rise to bifurcating solutions of the phenomenological equations, such as those of chemical kinetics, for example, and this gives rise to new dynamic, coherent structures, which have been called dissipative *structures. However, even in equilibrium systems, bifurcating solutions can occur, but in such cases they correspond to the occurence of an equilibrium phase transition" (1982, p.7).

According to F. HEYLIGHEN when a bifurcation takes place, pushing the system into one of several new regimes: "…the process is no longer predictable. We do not know which of the available trajectories the system will choose at the bifurcation point. The process becomes stochastic". (1989, p.366).

At a point of bifurcation the process becomes divergent. Thus bifurcations are antinomic to equifinality.

Categories

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

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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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