Decision Making in Systems Engineering and Management, 3rd Edition

Chapter 1Working with Systems

If your system doesn't work and you don't know why, it's quite hard to improve it.

—Jason Yosinski, Uber AI Labs

1.1 INTRODUCTION

So, let's begin with an idea that tacitly supports all of systems decision making and systems engineering (SE) in general. In 1928, Sir Arthur Eddington—a colleague and contemporary of Albert Einstein—published a small manuscript entitled “The Nature of the Physical World” [1] in which he attempted to explain in a relatively non‐technical way some of the most challenging ideas from physics. And while most of what he addresses are topics not necessarily aligned with this book's purpose, a few are worth noting because of their direct relevance to the principles and practices of systems work.

In the context of describing the running down of the universe, he said that “[a]ny change occurring to a body which can be treated as a single unit can be undone. The laws of Nature admit of the undoing as easily as of the doingThe common property possessed by laws governing the individual can be stated more clearly by a reference to time. A certain sequence of event running from past to future is the doing of an event; the same sequence running from future to past is the undoing of itNow the primary laws of physics taken one by one ...