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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PERTURBATION 1)2)

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Any input that modifies the dynamic equilibrium of a system or a subsystem, be it in a reversible or irreversible way.

The concept of perturbation is somehow ambiguous.

J.A. GOGUEN and F.J VARELA state: "If we stress the autonomy of a system… then the environmental influences become perturbations (rather than inputs) which are compensated for through the underlying recursive independence of the system's components" (1979, p.34).

The same situation exists between subsystems within the system. Each of them may receive from others inputs that perturb it.

There is however a considerable difference between so-called perturbing inputs: To ingest strychnine is not, as an input, in the same class than eating bread, as the first one will, irreversibly, kill the system while the second one will benefit it, allowing it to return to its own type of dynamic stability.

Perturbations play a very important role near an instability threshold in systems affected by giant fluctuations. Such a perturbation – in most cases a random environmental event, or noise – may destroy the former organized structure and induce a bifurcation, toward a different structuration through dissipation. However, a perturbation can have this effect only if it does not throw the system out of its historical macro-determinism, destroying it in the process.

"Perturbation" seems to be frequently used as a near synonym of "disturbance".

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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