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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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OSCILLATORS (Coupled) 2)

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Oscillators that influence one another and become synchronized.

This intriguing property was discovered by Chr. HUYGHENS in 1665.

S.H. STROGATZ and I. STEWART state: "Coupled oscillators can be found throughout the natural world, but they are especially conspicuous in living things: pacemaker cells in the heart, insulin-secreting cells in the pancreas; and neural networks in the brain and spinal cord that control such rhythmic behaviors as breathing, running and chewing. Indeed, not all the oscillators need be confined in the same organism: consider crikets that chirp in unison and congregations of synchronously flashing fireflies" (1993, p.68).

A mathematical theory of coupled oscillators has been developed and new angles have appeared recently through the chaos theory. The subject is obviously related to the composition of oscillations of different periods, but the way through which the significant "information" passes from one system to another is still in many cases not clearly understood.

Coupled oscillators must also have some relation with HAKEN's slaving principle and are an obvious necessity in organized systems and even in more or less synchronized quasi-systems, as for instance fish swarms (see D. RITZ, 1991).

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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