Complex Systems

You live, work, and interact in a complex system. You depend on other complex systems to make your life more efficient. You act as a critical element in the development and functioning of yet other complex systems. In fact, you are a complex system.

Created by Matthew Dearing
Last updated June 27 2002

Historically, the core sciences (physics, chemistry, and biology) focused on understanding the individual components of a system--like sub-atomic particles, atoms, DNA, or cells. Physicists are masters of this "bottom-up" approach to science, where they first figure out how the most basic units of a system work before making generalizations or predictions of how a system composed of these units might behave.

However, as our knowledge of "system components" becomes ever broader and deeper, scientists now realize that understanding the "big picture" of a large system, like the Earth's weather patterns, isn't guaranteed by knowing everything there is to know about its parts. For example, we have a great deal of understanding of fluid dynamics (how particles flow around) and thermodynamics (the average characteristics of a large number of particles, like temperature), but we still can't precisely predict the weather until the storm is just over the hill.

It turns out that systems composed of an enormous amount of interacting components--whether they are particles, cells, or people--will behave on the whole in ways that cannot be predicted by the individual behaviors of the components. This is what the study of complex systems is all about: look at how the components are organized and interact to explore how the entire system functions.

What is a hypography?

Hypography [n.]
A combination of "hyperlink" and "bibliography", i.e. a list of links to electronic resources related to any topic.

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