Derek Hitchins: Quotes about parting

Derek Hitchins is British systems engineer. Explore interesting quotes on parting.

Derek Hitchins: 28 quotes0 likes

“A system is an open set of complementary, interacting parts, with properties, capabilities and behaviours of the set emerging both from the parts and from their interactions to synthesize a unified whole.”

Hitchins (1998. p. 195) cited in: Peter Stasinopoulos (2009) Whole System Design: An Integrated Approach to Sustainable Engineering. p. 27

“The world about us can be looked at in a variety of ways. One way is to see the world as made up from many interacting systems: weather, societal, economic, ecological, floral, faunal, tectonic plate, oceanic, and so on. This is very much a connected view of the world: nothing is isolated and totally independent; everything is part of something bigger, and everything comprises many interacting parts — subsystems.”

Derek Hitchins (2013) at " Systems World http://www.hitchins.net/" at hitchins.net

“The motives for conceiving modern systems engineering are to be found, at least in part, in past disasters. Arthur D. Hall III [1989] cites: the chemical plant leakage in Bhopal (1986); the explosion of the NASA Challenger space shuttle (1986) and the Apollo fire (1967); the sinking of the Titanic (1912); the nuclear explosion in Chernobyl (1986) and the disaster at Three Mile Island power plant (1979). He cites, too, the capture of markets by Japan from the U. S., the decline in US productivity and the failure of the US secondary school system. He identifies the millions of people dying of starvation every year while other nations stockpile surplus food, medical disasters such as heart disease, while governments subsidize grains used to produce high cholesterol meat, milk and eggs; and many more. One implication is clear: systems engineering faces challenges well beyond the sphere of engineering.”

Source: Advanced Systems Thinking, Engineering and Management (2003), p. 75-76

“Emergence is not really mysterious, although it may be complex. Emergence is brought about by the interactions between the parts of a system. The galloping horse illusion depends upon the persistence of the human retina/brain combination, for instance. Elemental gases bond in combination by sharing outer electrons, thereby altering the appearance and behavior of the combination. In every case of emergence, the source is interaction between the parts — sometimes, as with the brain, very many parts — so that the phenomenon defies simple explanation.”

Source: Advanced Systems Thinking, Engineering and Management (2003), p. 25

“Emergence is the phenomenon of properties, capabilities and behaviours evident in the whole system that are not exclusively ascribable to any of its parts. Classic examples of emergence include: self awareness from the human brain; the pungent smell of ammonia emerging from two colorless, odorless gases-nitrogen and hydrogen; and so on.”

Source: Advanced Systems Thinking, Engineering and Management (2003), p. 24