GENERAL PROPERTIES OF BIOLOGICAL RHYTHMS

Biological rhythm research is a young but rapidly expanding science that touches many disciplines : botany, forestry, agriculture, various branches of theoretical and applied zoology, veterinary and human medicine, psychology, mathematics, statistics, cybernetics, and philosophy. It is already increasingly difficult for a single student to keep abreast with all aspects. Our conference takes you through vast areas of the field. The present paper is an introduction. It cannot cover the whole subject but aims at building up the concept of biological rhythms from the simplest possible premises, at interrelating the various subfields, and at presenting the essential problems of today and tomorrow. I refrain from references since it would be impossible to do full justice to all contributors.* We may call the study of the latter phenomenon clzronobiology. The biological rhythms belong here. Indeed, complete cessation of movement means death. It is often the independent variate in our graphs, but it is sobering to realize that we know little about it. According to older philosophers time was a measure of movement; in the modern version it measures the increase in entropy. Maybe it is an entity of its own; maybe it is serial with time measuring time measuring time. Perhaps time is vectorially related to space, as in the field equations, or represented in the concept of events, with the dimensions duration-mass. Perhaps biological life is logarithmic.