In the Machine Age science not only took the world apart, but it took itself apart, dividing itself into narrower and narrower disciplines. Each discipline represented a different way of looking at the same world. Shortly before World War II science began to put itself back together again so that it could study phenomena as a whole, from all points of view. As a result, a host of new interdisciplines emerged such as Operations Research, Cybernetics, Systems Engineering, Communications Sciences, and Environmental Sciences. Unlike earlier scientific disciplines which sought to separate themselves from each other and to subdivide; the new interdisciplines seek to enlarge themselves, to combine to take into account more and more aspects of reality. Systems Science is the limit of this process, an amalgamation of all the parts of science into an integrated whole. Thus, Systems Science is not a science, but is science taken as a whole and applied to the study of wholes.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.