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

INSTABILITY (BÉNARD's) 1)5)

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A dissipative structuration phenomenon that appears in a heated liquid.

This phenomenon discovered in 1908 by the French physicist BÉNARD, has been the first observed dissipative phenomenon,… in a jar of heating water. It implies the transition from a microscopic level of action to a macroscopic level of organization, which embraces a gigantic number of micro-elements.

R. LEFEVER and I. PRIGOGINE describe it as follows: "For a small difference of temperature, heat is conveyed by conduction, without any convection; but when the imposed temperature gradient reaches a threshold value, the stationary state (the fluid's state of "rest") becomes unstable: convection arises; it increases the rate of heat transfer and corresponds to the coherent motion of a huge number of molecules. In appropriate condition, the convection produces a complex spatial organization in the system" (1986).

Dissipative structuration transforms chaos into order (J. BRIGGS and F.D. PEAT, 1989, p.137).

Of course, this is not "a free lunch". As noted by PRIGOGINE: "The price is entropy! When we heat the system from below, most of the heat flow is lost, but some part of it is used to produce the pattern" (1989, p 7).

The resulting organisation takes the form of hexagonal convection cells. (See: "Hexagonal space filling ").

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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