TIME SCALE
| Collection | International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics |
|---|---|
| Year | 2004 |
| Vol. (num.) | 2(2) |
| ID | ◀ 3568 ▶ |
| Object type | General information |
The normal span of duration of a system or a class of systems (i.e. a species)
Systems have different life spans. This has very important consequences for their perceptive capacity and their specific activity range.
For each characteristic natural time span (for instance, the second, the hour, the day, the season, the year, the millenium, the geological era) some phenomena become visible or invisible.
The perceptive capacity of a living system, or a social system (and possibly, in the future, of artificial systems) stays in a close relation to its own time scale. Humans for example are timed to perceive hourly, daily and yearly variations, but the micro-second, the second, the century, the millenium or the geological era escape their normal range of perception.