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

INDETERMINACY RELATION: The Copenhague Interpretation 5)

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F. SUPPE summarizes it as follows:

"Exploiting the fact that microscopic particles sometimes act like corpuscles and sometimes like waves, the HEISENBERG indeterminacy relation is interpreted as showing the impossibility of measuring a physical quantity without causing a disturbance. Any attempt to improve the measurement of a parameter which characterizes a system will have the inevitable result of disturbing the value of another parameter of the system: unlike the macroscopic level, on the microscopic level these disturbances will be non-negligible; thus it is impossible to find the position and velocity of a subatomic particle at one moment with complete accuracy" (1978, p.182).

Indeed, at the macroscopic level, velocity is measured by comparing two or more successive positions, which implies that in these cases measurement of position and velocity, while accurate, cannot be really simultaneous. The real difference with microscopic particles is that here the system's identity is not significantly affected.

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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