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

BUTTERFLY (LORENZ') 1)2)

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A chaotic attractor whose graphical representation is similar to butterfly wings.

This attractor was discovered by the American meteorologist E. LORENZ. It graphicates the turbulent sequences of meteorological variations, submitted to the stochastic determinism proper to very complex systems. The same type of attractors appears in many other situations dependent from the sequence of interactions between various initial conditions. More generally, this is a chaotic attractor, for which, as stated by R. MAY "arbitrary close initial conditions can lead to trajectories which, after a sufficiently long time, diverge widely. This means that, even if we have a simple model in which all the parameters are determined exactly, long term prediction is nevertheless impossible" (1976, p.466).

In a metaphorical – but not at all rigorous – way, the so-called "butterfly effect" in weather forecasts says that, if a butterfly flaps its wings somewhere in the States today, it may produce a typhoon in the Eastern Pacific one month later, i.e. a small local initial effect may trigger a snowball effect eventually leading to a gigantic accumulative event, possibly faraway in space and 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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