Self-Organization in Physics

In my contribution, I shall present a small cross-section of a rather new field of interdisciplinary research called “synergetics”, HAKEN [1, 2, 3]. Emphasis will be laid on problems of fluid dynamics. In synergetics, we study the co-operation of individual parts of a system, which makes possible a self-organized formation of spatial, temporal, or functional structures on macroscopic scales. Systems studied so far belong to the fields of physics, electronics, mechanical and electrical engineering, chemistry, biology, and some “soft sciences”. We shall ask whether or not there are general principles that govern self-organization irrespective of the nature of the individual subsystems, which may be electrons, molecules, photons, biological cells, or animals. In particular, we wish to develop an operational approach that will allow us to actually calculate the evolving structures (or “patterns”). The price we have to pay for the general validity of our approach is that we are limited to considering only such situations in which the state of a system undergoes qualitative macroscopic changes. Figures 1 and 2 provide us with some simple examples.