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

INTERMITTENCE 1)

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The characteristic of a phenomenon or process which stops and starts by spurts at intervals.

The behavior of systems thus affected is dependent of the recurrence at long time scale of very important or massive events or conjunction of events. An example is the recurrence of glacial periods in Earth climate (see GOLDENFELD and KADANOFF, 1999, p. 87)

M. FARGE explains: "Spatio-temporal intermittence is linked to distribution in space of coherent structures and to distribution in time of the moments they connect and thus undergo strong interactions" (1992, p.240).

Other examples are volcanic eruptions, big earthquakes, crashes in stock markets, epidemics in populations, hurricanes in the Carribean zone, typhoons and "EI Niño"events in the Pacific Ocean. Intermittence generally implies sudden paroxystic changes or an epochal reversal in-between variable but long relaxation periods. It is related to synergetic processes, power laws, and dissipative structuration, all of these probably governed by great fluctuations of energy inputs, or their cumulative long term effects (Ibid, p.87-89).

Intermittence is in some sense the manifestation of a kind of memory in a system that sometimes seems to behave randomly.

Intermittence is in many case a signature of chaos.

P. BERGE and M. DUBOIS state: "The characteristic behavior of intermittences is that of a signal, regular – periodic or quasi-periodic – during a certain time span and evolves to give during a brief instant a chaotic "puff": it then turns back to its regular behavior and the process starts again.

In this case the chaotic behavior is defined not only by the "puffs" but still more by the random distribution of the regular period lengths" (1992, p.150).

The observation of intermittences as tracers of probable deterministic chaotic behavior could possibly be useful for the study of many ecological, economic, historical and social situations and systems.

→ Numbers (Prime); Periodicity; Term (short-, medium-, long-)

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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