TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1 introduced the principle of reconciled tensions, dualities, contrasts, and paradoxes, where opposing and seemingly mutually exclusive concepts harmoniously and even synergistically coexist in the same entity. The contrasting concepts retain their separate identities and characteristics in the entity, but both contribute to unity and balance. This situation is ubiquitous in the world, including in the world of science and engineering. Traditional engineering has encountered and dealt with such contrasts, but more often implicitly than explicitly. The need for science and math to deal with complex systems over the past century has led to unavoidable recognition of many contrasts and contradictions, and they have been made explicit but not so much in engineering.
A tool for reconciling contrasts, tensions, and paradoxes is the concept of views. This has not been recognized as a tool for dealing with contradictions in either science or engineering, but we propose that it is a natural tool for both. Complex systems are a locus not only for many contrasts and paradoxes, but also for their resolution. This section discusses, with a few examples, how views are an important, even crucial, tool in the harmonizing of contrasts and dualities.
In each contrast in the following list, the contrasting items can be represented as views of a common whole:
Top down and bottom up
Discrete and continuous (discussed in this chapter in the section entitled "Views in Broader Context")
Simplicity and complexity (much has been written...
