Some Aspects of Synergetics

Abstract

The speakers and participants of this international Workshop on Synergetics come from different disciplines, namely mathematics, physics, astrophysics, chemistry, biology and sociology. Accordingly, their topics seem to be quite different. Therefore I feel I should give a short introduction why I believe that such a workshop is meaningful and moreover, why “synergetics” is a promising new field of interdisciplinary research. The word “synergetics” is composed of two Greek words and means “working together”. In many disciplines, ranging from astrophysics over biology to sociology, we observe that very often the cooperation of many individual parts of a system leads to macroscopic structures or functionings. In its present state, synergetics focusses its attention to those situations, where the structures or functionings of the systems undergo dramatic changes on a macroscopic scale. In particular, synergetics investigates how the subsystems (parts) produce these changes in an entirely self-organized manner. The subsystems are usually discrete, e.g. atoms, cells, or humans. In a number of cases it is advantageous to treat such subsystems, for example molecules, as continuously distributed. Instead of going on with abstract definitions I rather present some explicit examples. Some of them will be discussed in much more detail during this workshop and many further examples will be treated by other speakers.