Introduction
V. I. Melnikov
As known, in development of any science there comes a time when the content of fundamental initial concepts becomes insufficient for describing and explaining the entire complex of continuously increasing size of experimental material referring to the sphere of interests of the given science [9, 92, 96].
Growing contradictions (occurrence of scientific anomalies) in the course of time urge the science to review and supplement the existing concepts or introduce the new ones, more capacious and perfect and within the grasp to make a complete change of conceptual apparatus with the appropriate transformation of the known and establishment of new interdependence.
In this case one speaks about changing a science paradigm or its individual part, the kind of revolution of global or local scale [38, 92]. As a rule, it is the result of gradual evolution of science based on sequential accumulation of experimental and analytical material.
The new paradigm can also refer to a complex of related sciences or interdisciplinary field. In this case a new paradigm often proceeds the occurrence of new science. This has happened, for example, with mathematical physics, biophysics and other boundary sciences. Some new paradigms open new problem fields like , for example, the general systems theory, synenergetics [103] and appearance of the theory of science development [38] is the example of new interdisciplinary paradigm coming into being. A paradigm change is like an original qualitative break in the development of science and often represents quite a painful process. The period of complete ignoring, incomprehension and denying, in case of paradigm progressive nature finally completes with general recognition and partial or entire review of existing conceptions and old basic theses of the given science.
Therewith, the degree of tenseness is proportional to degree of paradigm novelty. But also is proportional a possible efficiency of paradigm to the science development, including formation of new conceptions. Especially difficult is the process of paradigm change occurring in historically established, sturdily formed sciences with branched multilevel conceptual apparatus.
The process of paradigm changing is complicated as the commonness level of concepts introduced grows. In their turn proportionally grow the possibilities of new paradigm since the increase of concepts commonness is inevitably connected with growing capacity of their content and as a result the recognition of such new scientific systems can take decades and even centuries.
One knows dramatic pages of science history related to introduction of concepts of energy, ether, sciences like genetics, cybernetics and others. In resistance of scientific community to a new paradigm introduction there is a certain historic rationalism implementing a certain protection mechanism to defend a science and often the entire scientific ideology from stagnation and sometimes from regress. It is worth recollecting the history of concepts, heat generation, phlogiston, philosophers’ stone. The victory of theological paradigm in Middle Ages made a century retard in the development of technological progress and the entire civilization. Regardless of that the change of paradigms is inevitable as is the scientific progress itself.
Currently the greatest difficulties and sometimes unsolvable principal contradictions in investigation of real objects are related to inevitable narrowness and idealization of their description by means of individual “independent” sciences. For this purpose in each science there exists a large number of special local laws and regulations describing individual “independent” sides, elements and connections of a single real object. The inevitable consequence of that is the distorted concept of an object as a whole and finally sometimes deformation of the entire scientific ideology. Due to this there occur fundamentally unsolvable both certain problems of individual sciences and certain problems common to all mankind. This accounts for our ancestors difficult establishing and proving sphericity of the Earth, great efforts of scientists of the XIX-th century making available the idea of continents moving and heredity being encoded in a material carrier and so on. The situation occurred is well illustrated by the known saying “because of leaves one cannot see a forest”. Modern scientists very often are like doctors of very narrow specialization who treat a disease rather than a patient. Nature does not know that while investigation we split it into parts with further not very successful gathering. However, it hurts not nature but our knowledge about it. There is one cause of that – our limited research and, in particular, experimental facilities. However, in the course of time they also expand: experimental base grows, analytical and methodological possibilities develop.
In this connection one can cite “father” of synergy G. Huckan: ”Information overloaded with enormous amount of details shadowing the essence of the matter must be shrunk, by turning into a minor number of laws, conceptions and ideas. Synergy can be treated as one of these attempts” [103], i.e., it is necessary to make constant singling out of the enormous bunches of information the most general regulations, laws and principles to be the frame for constructing the entire natural-science picture of the world. It is evident, that this general basis is to absorb the latest achievements of science rather than use fossil concepts.
One of the goals of the work in question is the updating the research methodology based on application of maximally general conceptual apparatus having the maximal volume of initial data. In its essence, due to integration, integrity, versatility and possible perspectives the given work can be considered as a certain new interdisciplinary, and more precisely, theory of all sciences, allowing one to reduce into a single system a sufficiently wide class of objects, processes and phenomena referring to different branches of knowledge and different fields of science, including philosophy, physics, mathematics, biology and others. Some conclusions are extended to cosmology, medicine, ethics and philology.
Closeness to philosophy is determined by the commonness level of initial concepts and research objects as well as a series of analogies between philosophy laws and certain theory dependencies. Closeness to physics is specified by general methods of description and research (first of all the quantitative), a uniqueness of results, to biology – by qualitative contents of some initial concepts, to mathematics – by abstractedness and maximal extrapolation of some initial concepts and dependences.
The theory proposed allows one to outline directions of solutions of numerous traditional problems of these sciences, suggest new consistent interpretation of series of known experimental data, account for series of known phenomena and modify means of their description. The central fundamental concept (more precisely, category) of the theory proposed is the concept of “absolutely closed system”. Hence, in further presentation we will refer to it as the theory of closed system (TCS).
The possibility of TCS development appeared as a result of accumulation over the last centuries of large bodies of experimental and analytical materials, occurrence of complexes of new generalizing concepts, dependences, laws (concepts of environment, energy, entropy, conservation laws), coming into being series of interdisciplinary theories and laws as well as some “boundary” sciences (synergy, philosophy of science, information science, astrophysics, mathematical physics, cosmology and many others).
Based on these achievements there appeared the possibility of system quantitative description of any objects and processes and in so doing to create the general methodology of their research, i.e., TCS developments including development of initial concepts, their interconnection and consequence. The examples of this methodology implementation in solving issues occurring in different sciences are presented in the following sections.