Peter J. Plath – författare

This text will be replaced by the correThis book is aimed to a broad audience of researchers and students who are interested in questions of structure formation in complex systems in nature and society.

This text will be replaced by the correThis book is aimed to a broad audience of researchers and students who are interested in questions of structure formation in complex systems in nature and society. When we think of synergetics, impressive images of complex structures immediately come to mind. Such images serve us as starting point and guide for understanding structure formation in chemical, biological, physical, geological, and social systems.Many fascinating pictures of new experimental results illustrate the imagery of synergetics and at the same time enable precise statements about the underlying laws based on precise and discussed measurements. In this way, for example, the famous Runge pictures are accessible to a physico-chemical description, and it turns out that the well-known disintegration of the beer foam satisfies a consecutive kinetics with feedback. The modeling by means of cellular automata and iterated function systems enables us to study the cooperative character of pattern formation on sea shells on the one hand but also to show that creativity is a cooperative effect.ct back cover text / information text as soon as we get it.

All of us are confronted with complex phenomena occurring in daily life and in the living and inanimate nature surrounding us. Our scientific curiosity strives to unravel the mechanisms at work to create such complexity. Among various approaches to solve this problem, the field of synergetics, developed by Hermann Haken, has proven very successful as a general and interdisciplinary concept for describing and explaining complex phenomena that appear in systems under non-equilibrium conditions. These comprise dynamical states in evolving systems, spatial structure-forming processes, synchronization of states and regulatory mechanisms, and many other examples. The encompassing concepts have been applied to many disciplines, like physics, chemistry, biology, and beyond those also from synergetics to information theory, brain science, economics, and others.Starting from basic methods of complexity research and synergetics, this volume contains thirty contributions on complex systems that exhibit spontaneous pattern formation far from thermal equilibrium. Written by international experts and young researchers assembled under one roof, this volume reflects state of the art research from a variety of scientific fields and disciplines where complexity theory and synergetics are important or even indispensable tools today and in the future.

The concept of this book was developed during the Winter Seminar held in the Austrian mountains at the Alpengasthof Zeinisjoch, Tirol-Vorarlberg, from February 27 to March 3, 1988. Leading experts and advanced students in math­ ematics, physics, chemistry and computer science met to present and discuss their most recent results in an informal seminar. These were the circumstances that led to the idea of compiling some of the essential contributions presented at this seminar together with others describing basic features of "optimal struc­ tures in heterogeneous reaction systems". The aim of this book is to present the scientific results of the intensive work carried out in each of the specific fields of research. Each contribution therefore presents the current state of the art together with a deeper treatment enabling a more comprehensive understanding of that particular field of work. The common ideas which unite all the different contributions are already ex­ pressed in the title of this book. The nature of heterogeneous reaction systems is quite varied. An example is provided by the chemical systems such as noble metal particles which may act as heterogeneous catalysts for gaseous chemical compounds. Under these circumstances the metal particles and/or their sur­ faces may undergo phase transitions during reaction. Imbihl and Plath report on special catalytic systems of this kind, which are of industrial importance.