Synergetics: an overview
Synergetics is an interdisciplinary field of research that studies the spontaneous, i.e. self-organised, formation of structures in systems far from thermal equilibrium as well as in non-physical systems. The authors present an overview of some typical examples treated by synergetics, e.g. lasers, fluid instabilities, and instabilities in solid state physics. It is shown how the general concepts allow one to find principles for the construction of neural computers for pattern recognition. A number of further phenomena treated by the concepts of synergetics in biology are briefly indicated. They also give an outline of the typical theoretical methods to deal with these phenomena, namely the microscopic or mesoscopic approach which starts from the Langevin or Fokker-Planck equations. The central concepts of stability, order parameters, and the slaving principle are discussed and it is shown how they allow one to reduce the degree of complexity of such systems close to instability points quite considerably. They also discuss a second approach by means of the maximum information entropy principle which provides one with a macroscopic treatment.