Bridging reductionism and holism — multi-scale methodology with applications to particle-fluid systems
✍ Scribed by Jinghai Li
- Publisher
- Elsevier
- Year
- 2005
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 22 KB
- Volume
- 3
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1672-2515
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
While science continues to extend to two extremes ⎯ micro-scale towards dimensions even smaller than elemental particles and mega-scale even beyond the universe, one recognizes that reductionism is not sufficient to solve many problems we encounter in engineering, which are likely characterized by nonlinearity, nonequilibrium and dissipative multi-scale structures. On the other hand, the common features of these nonlinear systems, such as bifurcation, state multiplicity and self-organization, have attracted much attention, leading to the approaches of the so-called complexity science which has become a focus not only in natural science and engineering science, but also in social science.