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Hi Tim: Sorry for the delay in replying to your post. I'm lucky to have any window of time at all in which to respond. As I've already explained in my earlier posts, the definition I ultimately settled on has worked well in the application for which I developed it. I'll have to give some thought to your definition. It might work in my application, but that would hinge on what kind of qualitative or quantitative measurements one would make to describe the system's behavior... that is, what parameters one picks as being sufficient to the descriptive task at hand. In my case, "energy or information" parameters worked as the semantic equivalent of your "qualitatively or quantitatively measured" parameters, and "exchanges" worked as the semantic equivalent of your term "behavior". In that sense, your definition seems equivalent to mine, only with slightly different semantic encoding. All the comments I made in my earlier posts still apply as regards the purpose for which one creates any definition; the definition has a job to do, so that establishes a context. I'm not sure how general one can make a definition of a word like "process" and still expect it to be useful. For example, is it meaningful to talk about the "qualitatively or quantitatively measured behavior" of, say, an ingot of lead (Pb) inside an evacuated Bell jar ("the system"), wherein the lead ingot and the jar are in thermal equilibrium with the jar's environment? No matter how you pick your delta t across the initial & final states, any measurements you might make of the system's "behavior" during the delta t are going to show zero variance (within the precision of the measuring instruments). Is it meaningful to say that the system states across the delta t define a "process"? In an earlier post, I admitted to a certain prejudice underlying my original question. That prejudice is an artifact of a certain specificity in the context in which the "general" definition I was looking for had to be useful. As it turned out, my specification of "energy" was a mundane, utilitarian parameter. "Information" was far more fundamental, or at least it was more useful as a descriptive process parameter. But then, I'm already biased toward "information" as a far more fundamental parameter than energy in most processes in the first place. It seems to me that there was at least one series of earlier posts that addressed the subject of information -- alas, 'twas a thread I didn't have time to read. I've saved it, though; perhaps I should go back and read it before I stir up matters that the participants in that earlier discussion have already resolved. In any case, "process" connotes some sense to me that is descriptive of non-zero values in the parametric measurements one makes about any system one is attempting to describe or analyze across the given delta t. I had specific purpose in my use of the term "exchanges" -- again, because of the specific context in which I intended the definition to apply -- a purpose that John M.'s suggestion of the alternate term "changes" couldn't adequately address. "Exchanges" implies a certain degree of connectivity to or integrability with the subject system's environment. It's more descriptive of the kinds of changes one finds in the systems I'm studying, which admittedly kind of shoots my "general" specification for a "process" defintion in the foot. So maybe I wasn't really looking for something quite as general as I thought I was. (heh) Best regards, Pete Tim Gwinn wrote: (previous content snipped) |