Geochemistry of Earth surface systems. From the treatise on geochemistry / Геохимия систем поверхности Земли. Из трактата по геохимии

It is now common parlance to refer to the Earth as a physical–chemical–biological system; but this is a relatively recent innovation. Until about 1950, geologists generally used the word ‘system’ to define geologic periods, or the several crystal classes, or the physical chemistry of multicomponent mixtures. Long before then, the word ‘system’ in its current usage had been a part of the vocabulary of a number of fields, including communication and control engineering. In fact, the first significant paper on feedback mechanisms in control systems was written by Clerk Maxwell in 1868. Its subject was governors (mechanical, not political). In the 1930s and 1940s, Norbert Wiener of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Arturo Rosenblueth of the Harvard Medical School applied communication engineering design to physiology, converted the field into a branch of statistical mechanics, and christened it Cybernetics. Wiener’s book ‘Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine’ (1948) introduced the subject to a wide audience, which, happily, included geochemists. <...>