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

NUCLEATION MECHANISM 1)2)

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A mechanism by which a new structure establishes itself first in a limited region and than invades the whole space.

According to G. NICOLIS and I. PRIGOGINE, the concept originates in physico-chemistry as"… the phenomenon of nucleation familiar from equilibrium phase transitions" (1977, p.323).

It appears when a system submitted to widening fluctuations becomes unstable, which leads to dissipative structuration. The new structure will be a more or less randomly result of the antagonism between the instability that tends to amplify the fluctuation and "the effect of the large outside environment in which fluctuations may be neglected. The outside world thus acts as a mean field that tends to damp the fluctuations through the interactions which occur on the boundaries of the fluctuating region… In the case of small size fluctuations, boundary effects will dominate and fluctuations will regress. On the contrary, for large scale fluctuations, boundary effects become negligible.

Between these limiting cases lies the actual size of nucleation. This is the reason why a general law of fluctuations independent of size, such as given by a POISSON distribution, is no longer valid" (PRIGOGINE et al., 1978, p.52).

The same mechanism is obviously present in population genetics and in technical innovation, for instance. P.P. GRASSÉ's stigmergy also is an example of a nucleation mechanism.

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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