The Journal of Simple Systems

Welcome to the Journal of Simple Systems! The credo and rationale for the journal is described below. Articles will be added from time to time, and papers are listed chronologically so that you can check the site from time to time and see what is new.

The journal is edited, published, and so far written by William Silvert, a retired marine ecologist. His home page is http://bill.silvert.org. In the unlikely event that you want to publish here, send him the manuscript. Contributions are welcome, but are unlikely to help the authors secure jobs or promotions.

Why a Journal of Simple Systems?

As every scientist knows, all systems are complex. The reason for this is obvious. If you write a proposal that says, “This system is very complex. I want $1,000,000 to study it” there is a good chance that you will be funded. But if you say “This system is very simple. I want $1,000,000 to study it” you haven’t a chance.

Yet many interesting systems are indeed simple. They are interesting because they exhibit interesting, often complex behaviour, and so for practical reasons any simple system that exhibits complex behaviour is referred to as a complex system. This leads to confusion between the system itself and its behaviour.

An ideal example of a fascinating simple system is the spinning top (the image to the left, which we use as our logo, is from Barnes et al. 1888). What could be simpler than a plain object with some degree of axial symmetry? The top is one of the oldest toys known, and even the most primitive tribes have discovered them. And yet, the motion of the top, with its complex progression from spinning to precession to nutation, is very difficult to understand and was only explained in the mid-eighteenth century through the work of the great mathematician, Leonhard Euler (1765). Euler’s work remains a classic and is still taught in advanced mechanics courses for graduate students in physics.

In many situations complex systems actually behave more simply than similar simple systems. Consider the case of wheeled vehicles. The simplest of these is probably the unicycle, but these are difficult to ride and their dynamics can baffle even a skilled circus artist. Two-wheeled bicycles are more complex, especially with their sophisticated gearing, but are easier to ride and dynamically simpler. The early automobiles were much more complex machines, but simpler still to drive since there was no need to deal with balance issues. Evolution of the automobile culminated in the modern automatic, an incredibly complex and refined system which is so simple to drive that occasionally a young child who can barely see over the dashboard drives off in his parents’ car, leading the police on a wild chase. In fact, much of the complexity of modern machines serves only to simplify their operation.

Insisting that simple systems are complex because of their complex behaviour can have serious consequences. One of the most common criticisms of scientific theories of biology and geology is that our world is too complex to arise from natural processes and must have been created by some intelligent designer. Much scientific work shows however that the complexity we see in nature often arises from very simple mechanisms. For example, Meinhardt (1995) showed that the incredible variety and beauty of sea shells can be generated by a simple reaction-diffusion equation.

It is time to call simple systems simple. But if this journal required funding, of course it could not exist!

References

Barnes, C. J., H. H. Ballard And S. P. Thayer. 1888. New National First Reader. Chicago American Book Company, New York.

Euler, L. 1765. Du mouvement de rotation des corps solides autour d'un axe variable. Mémoires de l'académie des sciences de Berlin 14: 154-193.

Meinhardt, H. 1995. The Algorithmic Beauty of Sea Shells. Springer-Verlag, Berlin.

Address all correspondence to the editor, william@silvert.org. As for copyright, who would steal a simple idea? Just be sure to acknowledge the source.