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

ECTROPY 1)2)

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"… the ability of open and organized systems to use the environmental substances, rich in easily released energy, to maintain… a given level of entropy or even to lower it" (V.I. KREMYANSKIY, 1969, p.142).

Systems do this as they "maintain irregular distributions (gradients) of substance concentration and support synthesis processes founded on the binding and simultaneously the dispersing of energy" (Ibid).

The concept was imagined by AUERBACH, according to whom "… Iife is an organization created to avert the menacing entropy-death of the universe" (L.von BERTALANFFY, 1969, p.77).

BERTALANFFY states: "Ectropy does not exist. However, thermodynamics was concerned only with closed systems, and its extension to open systems leads to very unexpected results" (Ibid).

Originally the notion of ectropy was no more than a purely verbal explanation, in finalistic terms, of a still quite ill understood situation, i.e. the existence of some compensation to the entropic degradation of energy. More recently, PRIGOGINE and his school developed the new thermodynamics of open systems and extended it to the irreversible systems with structurating dissipation of energy and eventual emergence into higher levels of complexity.

However, in his 1960 paper, KREMYANSKIY was already giving a satisfactory meaning to the concept of ectropy.

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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