Essentials on systems and control

Abstract

The aim of systems theory is to investigate a variety of phenomena regardless of their specific nature but rather focusing on a set of essential relationships linking the objects involved and on questions concerning changes emanating from interactions among aforementioned objects and from their interplay with the environment. Systems theory places emphasis on certain features of the above set of essential relationships which come to characterise structure, organisation and patterns of order interrelating the objects under investigation; in particular in the way these objects function.

Erwin Schrödinger (in [171], pp. 18-19)

... there is a tendency to forget that all science is bound up with human culture in general, and that scientific findings, even those which at the moment appear the most advanced and esoteric and difficult to grasp, are meaningless outside their cultural context. A theoretical science unaware that those of its constructs considered relevant and momentous are destined eventually to be framed in concepts and words that have a grip on the educated community and become part and parcel of the general world picture - a theoretical science, I say, where this is forgotten, and where the initiated continue musing to each other in terms that are, at best, understood by a small group of close fellow travellers, will necessarily be cut off from the rest of cultural mankind; in the long run it is bound to atrophy and ossify however virulently esoteric chat may continue within its joyfully isolated groups of experts.