A COMMENT ON STRUCTURAL STABILITY

It is argued, on the basis of some simple examples, that the concept of structural stability, as a scientific principle, is difficult to relate to a priori mathematical characterizations in terms of genericity or transversality. In general, the employment of mathematical objects to represent physical situations carries with it a number of tacit constraints, which impose crucial biases on the mathematics. This is illustrated by the disparity in behavior between pure real and pure imaginary eigenvalues of simple linear systems.