ZEITREISEN - IAAC

Demonstration:
As an example of a complex system you can consider a
closed tube of glass (about 30 cm long) with water and a
little amount of sand of grains of different shapes and
sizes. If you turn it, the sand starts falling down creating
at first whirls, then the grains fall as a homogenous cloud,
while at the end, it divides according to the size of grains
and creates sediments of different size of grains on the
bottom. Having possibility to look only in the middle of the
tube where occur chaotic motions of particles and
particles are still mixed you cannot get idea about the
sediments, divided according to the size of grains, that
will create on the bottom later...
Simplicity and complexity
We can give simple questions but there are often not simple answer.
- How fast generations of animals change? For example, since Year One there were only about 100
generations of people while there could be about 100.000 generations of a kind of insect during
this PERIOD.
Is it not possible to find more exact numbers here? The problem is that there are too many NOT
EXACTLY DEFINED PARAMETERS. Consider how the process is developing!
- There are TOO MANY PARTS (participants, particles) in the system with their own freedom of
motion.
- The process occurs in an OPEN SYSTEM. The term open means that the system is open to outer
influences that are not possible to evaluate more exactly.
- The process is absolutely NOT LINEAR.
Even if we don’t take into consideration individual relations between the particular participants, the
population of animals depends on the crop while the crop depends on weather…
- Try to define at least the starting condition. Neither people from one generation cannot be defined
exactly and we have simultaneously people from different generations, etc. At the same time the
weather depends on BUTTERFLY EFFECT (a small change somewhere in the world can
influence the weather in other part of the world).
For such cases we can describe the development only with a CERTAIN EXACTNESS by help of
STATISTICAL CHARACTERISTICS AND PROBABILITY APPROACH. A good example is the tube
with water and sand. Don’t you object now that the sand system is an ordinary system and very simple
with respect to a living system?
New point of view
Can we say generally that a simple system behaves in a simple way while a more complicated system
must behave in a more complicated way?
By KNOWLEDGE OF MECHANICS the answer is YES. But by this way we can describe only systems
with a relatively small number of parameters and all outer and inner conditions have to be under our
control, e.g. any sudden influences cannot appear (they must be negligible). But these conditions are
true only very rarely.
And, if the system behaves in unexpected way? Can we predict the
behaviour of such a system at all? In this case we know that either
- the system consists of too many parts that we are not able to describe
particularly by mechanics or
- the system must be influenced by stochastic influences from outside.
In both cases we must look for another way of the systems description!
The answer on the former question could be YES, by a COMPLEX
APPROACH. The complex approach means that we don´t try to describe
ZEITREISEN - 16. INTERNATIONALE PROJEKTWOCHE DES IAAC IN TANZENBERG SEITE 45