Conclusion and literature

Lecture



The world is on the verge of tremendous social change - in essence, we are witnessing the birth of a new civilizational structure, in which the sphere of labor, management, education, and leisure will be fundamentally different. According to the American philosopher and sociologist E. Toffler [16] the development of science and technology is carried out in waves; It has three such waves - the first wave (agrarian civilization) and the second (industrial civilization) replace the new third wave, leading to the creation of a super-industrial civilization, which brings with it new institutions, attitudes, values. The coming world will be based on electronics, computers, space production, the use of the depths of the ocean and bio-industry, the password of this civilization is information. Informatization of society will transform technology, politics, education, family.

In different periods of the development of civilization, scientific paradigms, the educational system, and relations in society changed. Note that education plays a subordinate role in relation to science: - a one-directional dependence of science has developed Conclusion and literature education Conclusion and literature practice.

In the patriarchal (agrarian) period of civilization (the first wave), individuality was inherent in education. The places of study were concentrated in universities, philosophical schools, churches, monasteries, and the educational method used fit into the scheme of the "magician's student."

The beginning of industrial civilization (the second wave) was due to the development of the mechanics of the XVII - XVIII centuries and was associated with the names of Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus and others, and the most vivid expression was received in the works of Newton.

As shown in the first chapter, the model of the world and the scientific paradigm of the XVIII century were briefly summarized as follows:

  • matter exists in three-dimensional (Euclidean) space and in time; they are independent of each other;
  • the material world has well-defined boundaries;
  • there is a linear causal relationship in the world, that is, every phenomenon has its own cause and at the same time there are reasons for other phenomena. Cause and effect form a chain that comes from the past, permeates the present and disappears in the future.
  • In physics in the 18th century, one fundamental interaction is known - gravity.

Scientists of that time were convinced that if we set the laws of motion (Newton's laws), the initial coordinates and speeds of bodies, then the behavior of the system is completely predetermined and the past and future trajectories of the body are known in advance. The world is a grandiose clockwork, which was once set in motion, and the Universe develops according to quite fatalistic deterministic laws. In such a world, there is no place for chance, and irreversibility and probability were made to be associated with incomplete knowledge.

Scientific knowledge was based in this period on the following ideological and methodological principles: mechanism, rationalism, determinism, reductionism, linearity.

Mechanism means that all phenomena of nature tried to explain or reduce to mechanical processes. It is considered to be the ancestor of the rationalism of the English philosopher and public figure F. Bacon, who proclaimed the basis of the scientific method at the beginning of the XVII century: "the acquired knowledge is based on experiment."

Reductionism assumed the reduction of complex systems to the analysis of its individual constituent elements and their interactions.

Determinism is associated with the cause-and-effect principle. The physical world was described by linear equations.

These principles had a decisive influence on the education system, i.e. the form of mastering knowledge, the presentation of the material, and the organizational principles of education [2].

In particular, it was assumed that a person in this world accumulates knowledge, cognizes nature, gradually increasing the number of relative truths, and moves along the asymptote to the absolute truth. The obtained knowledge, as history has shown, ensured the domination of Man over Nature.

Such a picture of the world was formed at the end of the XVIII century - the Enlightenment century. But, as always happens in the history of science, well-being did not last very long, and the first clouds appeared in the blue sky of science. As noted in the second chapter, at the beginning of the 19th century, an industrial revolution began in the world. At enterprises, steam engines are increasingly common, which promise an industrial revolution to the world, since they provide a new powerful source of energy. Instead of wind, water, muscular power, it becomes possible to use the energy of steam engines. Through the efforts of talented engineers, the machines themselves came into being much earlier than the science describing thermal phenomena - thermodynamics. The appearance of the latter is associated with the name of a young French engineer Sadi Carnot, who showed that not all the heat can be turned into work, part of it is necessarily lost; An expression was found for the limit value of the efficiency of a heat engine, which is less than 100%. Thus, the heat engine has some internal inefficiency, which has been quantified in the second law of thermodynamics.

In the future, in 1864, the German physicist Clausius introduced into use a very strange and incomprehensible value - entropy S = Conclusion and literature Q / T, equal to the ratio of heat transferred by the body Conclusion and literature Q to its absolute temperature. The physical meaning of this quantity was not clear for a long time, and its behavior is strange, since it possessed a rare property only to grow. There is only one physical quantity with a similar property - time.

At the end of the 19th century, the Austrian physicist L. Boltzmann showed that a macroscopic quantity — entropy — is associated with a microscopic parameter — the movement of molecules, and the latter tends to move from less likely states to more likely states (another formulation of the second law of thermodynamics). And the most probable state of the particles is their tendency toward a uniform distribution in space.

This was a mystery of entropy growth, but clarity in this matter led to a new problem: if the second law of thermodynamics is applied to the Universe, then it turns out that thermal death awaits the Universe. In this state, all gradients (temperatures, pressures, energy, etc.) disappear in nature, and it turns into gray homogeneous chaos, only some deviations from such a state are possible due to fluctuations.

This conclusion caused a whole storm of criticism in the scientific world, but Boltzmann’s conclusions were so irreproachable that for a long time the problem of the thermal death of the Universe was not fully understood, and only at the end of the 20th century it got its resolution.

With the advent of the concept of probability in physics, it was necessary to revise the notions of determinism and chance that were formed in the 18th century. Accident in the 19th century entered science not only from physics, but also from biology, i.e. from the Darwinian doctrine of evolution. It follows from it that evolution in the biological world proceeds according to the pattern of variability, selection, heredity. Variability is largely determined by random events.

During the 19th century, major advances were made in the study of the phenomena of electricity, magnetism, and electromagnetism. The nature of these phenomena was studied by a group of experimenters (Om, Biot, Savard, Ampere, Faraday) and summarized by the English physicist Maxwell in electromagnetic field theory. The science included ideas about the new form of matter - field and second - electromagnetic - interaction in Nature. The 19th century is also remarkable in other areas of science, in particular in genetics.

So, by the end of the 19th century, ideas about nature had expanded considerably, namely: matter was presented in two forms - field and corpuscular, iron determinism of the 18th century was significantly softened, and the case acquired the status of a scientific category.

In the new twentieth century, natural scientists were waiting for the next surprises, which went down in history as a scientific revolution. Difficulties arose when trying to explain the thermal radiation of a heated body, this phenomenon was carefully studied by experimenters, but did not give way to a theoretical description. To solve this problem, the German physicist Planck in 1900 introduced the hypothesis of energy quanta, i.e., he suggested that energy cannot be transmitted continuously by any fractions, but only in well-defined portions, energy quanta. This hypothesis contradicted the prevailing notions, seemed wild, but relatively quickly came into use by physicists, found brilliant experimental confirmation and formed the basis of a new direction in physics — quantum physics.

At the same time, thanks to the works of the German physicist A. Einstein, general and special theories of relativity were created, according to which the three main parameters of nature - matter space and time, independent parameters, considered in the XVIII and XIX centuries, and interdependent.

The theory of relativity and quantum physics constituted the essence of the new physics, the new world view.

At the beginning of the 20th century, new discoveries were made in physics, including the number of fundamental interactions expanded: along with the well-known long-range interactions — electromagnetic and gravitational — two short-range interactions — strong and weak — became known. The sixth chapter shows how Shannon, an American communications specialist, developed information theory; efforts of the American physicist Wiener, a new science - cybernetics. The stunning discoveries were made in biology. Following science, amazing changes took place in technology, medicine, etc.

Mankind has come to the world, in which atomic energy, space and rocket technology, cybernetics, laser, computer, the wonders of modern chemistry, bacteriology and biology have come into being.

But in the middle of the 20th century, another event occurred, the consequences of which are only being understood: the further development of thermodynamics led to the emergence of open-type thermodynamics, or non-equilibrium thermodynamics (chapter three).

In the 40s, the work of the Norwegian researcher Onzager and the Belgian physicist Prigogine appeared, which showed that in open systems such a process is possible in which the entropy of the system can decrease, i.e. the system can spontaneously change from chaotic states. For these works he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1977, and the new science received the name of synergy (the fourth chapter). It discusses various cooperative processes, sometimes called coherent or coherent. In this connection, the question is possible: what determines the development of the system, the competition of its elements, or, conversely, their coordinated action (mutual action). A new definition of the system proposed by the outstanding Russian physiologist PK Anokhin has appeared: "The system can only be called such a complex of selectively involved elements, in which the mutual action and interrelations take on the nature of the interoperability of the components to obtain a fixed useful result."

The essence of synergetics can be defined very succinctly with the help of the triad - nonlinearity, coherence, openness (chapter five). Synergetics is only getting back on its feet, this is a young science, but it already forces us to reconsider the existing picture of the world, leading to a significant change in the scientific paradigm of a postindustrial civilization.

The old scientific paradigm that has developed over the three hundred years of development of modern science, as already noted, can be briefly characterized by the words rationalism, determinism, reductionism, linear mathematics. Synergetics leads to a different scheme of cognition and description of Nature. It is based on universal evolutionism, a combination of determinism and stochasticity, holism and reductionism, non-linear mathematical apparatus. First of all, in synergetic it is emphasized that in the single Nature there should be observed the uniform laws of Evolution. This position significantly expands the boundaries of the rationalistic view of Nature, and is called universal evolutionism. Development obeys both deterministic and stochastic laws, for a harmonic state a certain combination of the two is required (see chapter seven).

Let us dwell once more on reductionism, which reduced the study of complex systems to the analysis of its individual components and their interaction. This method is the most important stage not only in the history of science, but also in industrial civilization. But this approach turned out to be not universal - the formation of collective behavior of elements (coherence of elements) and the formation of a system from them requires a different methodical approach, called the holistic (holistic).

In the process of evolution, the system sooner or later moves from a stable to an unstable state, that is, it passes through a bifurcation point from which it can go either to more chaotic states or to new structural formations. Prigogine called such systems dissipative structures. They have the properties of coherence, that is, they behave as a whole and are structured as if, for example, each molecule in the system was “informed” about the state of the system as a whole. Note that the study of these systems requires the use of non-linear mathematical apparatus (Chapter Seven).

The post-industrial civilization will apparently be based on the principles discussed above. In the literature of the last decade of the twentieth century, the idea of ​​the existence of new fundamental interactions in Nature sounds ever more persistently. In particular, a theory of spin-torsion interactions was created for almost a hundred years. These works take their name from the French mathematician Cartan, then they were developed in the works of Professor Oxford R. Penrose and the works of the Russian physicist GI Shipov [17]. It is argued that torsion interaction has amazing properties: its speed far exceeds the speed of light, it has significantly penetrating properties, is able to store and transfer information without energy, torsion fields can form stable information structures, etc. If this is true, then scientific The paradigm will once again undergo a radical change, and this will entail new technology, philosophy, and a device for life. In a word, post-industrial can bring us many surprises ...

created: 2016-12-17
updated: 2021-12-04
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Synergetics

Terms: Synergetics