Advances in Conception about Earthquakes - Earthquake Engineering for Structural Design - page 115

4.2.2 System Theory and Earth Science
During the past three decades, scientists, philosophers and mathematicians have
been working to construct a theoretical framework for unifying the many branches
of the sciences, natural and social. The outcome of this effort is the System Theory,
which provides a framework for understanding both natural and human-
constructed environments and it is an attempt to formulate common laws which
apply to every scientific field.
The System Theory is a trans-disciplinary/multi-perceptual theory which studies
structure and properties of systems in terms of relationships, from which new
properties of the whole emerge (Wikipedia, nd). This theory focuses on
arrangement and relations among the parts, connecting them into the whole. It
means that the whole is more than the sum of the parts and it is directly related to
the new Science of Complexity (Casti, 1994). The Theory of Complexity can be
interpreted in the elementary meaning that, if a system has more components, they
are joined in such a way that it is difficult to separate them. This theory tries to
elaborate computational methodologies for the quantification of the System
Theory. Due to the dynamical nonlinear behavior of the complex systems, the
Complexity Theory is related to Evolutionary System, Self-Organized Dissipative
Systems, Bifurcations, Catastrophes and Chaos Theories (Casti, 1994).
In order to have a holistic science to study the Earth, the System Theory
approach has been widely accepted as a framework by science communities
(Turcotte and Malamud, 2002). So, the Earth Science (also known as Geoscience
or Geophysics) built a branch of the general theory, in which the Earth is treated as
a system, which evolves as a result of cooperation of some constituent sub-
systems, the main topics being the Atmosphere (with Climatology and
Meteorology), the Biosphere (with Biogeography), the Hydrosphere (with
Oceanography) and Geosphere (with the fields of Geophysics and Seismology).
Fundamental for the Earth Science approach is the need to emphasize the
interaction among these sub-systems as a dynamical process which extends over
spatial scales from microns to the size of planetary orbits, and over time scales of
milliseconds to billions of years. Therefore, within the concept of the Earth as a
complex and dynamic entity involving the disciplinary spheres for land, air, water
and life, there is no process or phenomenon which occurs in complete isolation
from the other elements of the Earth System.
4.2.3 Self-Organized Dissipative SystemsandMantle Convection
The history of conceptions about the evolutionary systems is represented by a
succession of changing of paradigms. The first main paradigm was the Newtonian
one, which starts with Brahe's, Kepler's and Galilei's observations about the
mathematical models for the solar system. Newton, in his masterpiece
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (published in 1687), called also the
Principia for short, was searching for universal principles which could be used to
explain the physical world around him. In this process, he arrived at three laws, the
well-known Newtonian Laws of Motion. The first law states that a body in motion