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.

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NUMBERS (Law of Great) 2)

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H. SIMON has stressed the importance of the Law of Great numbers as an aggregation tool, or variety reductor. He gives statistical mechanics as an example of this simplifying potential. By its use "it transforms the enormous complexity of a mechanical microsystem into the relative simplicity of macroscopic thermodynamic regularities.

"Through stochastic processes, we simplify the description of a dynamic system's history by ignoring temporal trajectories of its various elements and by considering solely their distribution among the states of the system and the transference probababilities from one state to another. Another important simplification is obtained by considering only the equilibrium states of such systems, which can be frequently calculated without taking in account the trajectories used to reach these states" (1990, p.140).

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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