Has mankind evolved to a point that there exists, or that with creativ — Arthur D. Hall

"The plan of the present paper is to discuss properties of systems more or less abstractly; that is to define system and to describe the properties that are common to many systems and which serve to characterize them all."

"Unfortunately, the word "system" has many colloquial meanings, some of which have no place in scientific discussion. In order to exclude such meanings, and at the same time provide a starting point for exposition we state the following definition: A system is a set of objects together with relationships between the objects and between their attributes. Our definition does imply of course that a system has properties, functions or purposes distinct from its constituent objects, relationships and attributes."

"For any given system, the environment is the set of all objects whose behaviour is influenced by the behaviour of the primary system, and those objects whose behaviour influences the behavior of the primary system."

"In our definition of system we noted that all systems have interrelationships between objects and between their attributes. If every part of the system is so related to every other part that any change in one aspect results in dynamic changes in all other parts of the total system, the system is said to behave as a whole or coherently. At the other extreme is a set of parts that are completely unrelated: that is, a change in each part depends only on that part alone. The variation in the set is the physical sum of the variations of the parts. Such behavior is called independent or physical summativity."

"Synthesis of systems is much more difficult. Here science and engineering begin to take on aspects of art. A systems designer or planner not only must construct systems that work harmoniously individually and in tandem, he must also know a lot about the environment that the system is intended to match. Consideration of environmental factors requires foresight and experience; no one can ever foresee all the variables of importance and a choice of which to include is often a difficult one to make."

"It is time to employ fractal geometry and its associated subjects of chaos and nonlinear dynamics to study systems engineering methodology (SEM). Systematic codification of the former is barely 15 years old, while codification of the latter began 45 years ago... Fractal geometry and chaos theory can convey a new level of understanding to systems engineering and make it more effective"