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

HAMILTONIAN SYSTEM 2)

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A system whose study is amenable to Hamiltonian mechanics.

Hamiltonian systems are governed by Hamiltonian dynamics i.e. in R. THOM's words "A dynamics where there is no energy lost through dissipation" and as a result "the look of trajectories is not notably modified" (1993, p.41).

M. FARGE writes: "Hamiltonian mechanics deals only with stable states, or close to equilibrium, and describes only conservative, i.e. reversible phenomena, while turbulent flows are highly unstable and dissipative, i.e. irreversible; moreover classical dynamics always started from systems with few interactive elements, without a great number of degrees of freedom" (1992, p.212).

Only homeostatic systems are amenable to Hamiltonian mechanics, because in G. NICOLIS words they: "admit a variety of conservation laws, constraining their evolution very strictly". But "as a counterpart they present rather poor stability properties in the sense that their evolution remains strongly dependent on the initial conditions" (1981, p.188). In other words, they are tightly deterministic. Dissipative, bifurcative systems are unstable and non-Hamiltonian. Note the correlation with POINCARÉ's 3-bodies or n-bodies problem.

Now that deterministic chaos and dissipative structuration have been discovered and researched, it becomes obvious that Hamiltonian systems and dynamics are rather abstract and theoretic models of not so common systems or very simplified ones.

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
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  • 5) Discipline oriented

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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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