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Time, the fundamental dimension of our existence,
has fascinated artists, philosophers, and scientists of
every culture and every century. All of us can remember
a moment as a child when time became a personal reality,
when we realized what a "year" was, or asked ourselves
when "now" happened. Common sense says time moves
forward, never backward, from cradle to grave. Nevertheless,
Einstein said that time is an illusion. Nature's laws, as
he and Newton defined them, describe a timeless, deterministic
universe within which we can make predictions with complete
certainty. In effect, these great physicists contended that
time is reversible and thus meaningless.
The research of Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine
has in recent years brought about a radical change of perspective.
Scientists have continued to discover instabilities and
fluctuations that lead to evolutionary patterns on all levels
of existence, from the cosmology of the universe to the
biology of molecules. Time-reversible processes are rare
in the real world and irreversible ones (such as scrambling
an egg) are occurring all around us every day -- but not
until Prigogine did anyone seriously attempt to include
this obvious irreversible flow of time in the laws of physics.
In doing so, he transformed physics, giving it a new cultural
relevance. In the arts, medicine, business, social science,
and technology, professionals have acknowledged their debt
to his fundamental and resounding insights.
Now Prigogine presents to the general reader
his profound break with the classical description of nature,
examining the Western approach to time and showing that
as we follow the probabilistic processes of the real world,
we travel far beyond the dead mechanics of determinism.
In expounding his argument, he leads us on a marvelous intellectual
adventure beginning with the Greeks, through Newtonian trajectory
and deterministic chaos, and onward to the heights of a
unified formulation of quantum theory and "free lunch"
cosmology. His dramatic findings include that quantum mechanics
can be extended to demonstrate time's natural irreversibility,
and further, he argues that time actually preceded the Big
Bang.
Prigogine deconstructs the deterministic
world view, but does not champion the idea of an arbitrary
universe of pure chance. Instead, he argues, we live in
a world of definable probabilities where life and matter
evolve continuously in the direction of time, and certainty
itself is the illusion. Notions such as "self-organization"
that Prigogine introduced in previous work now take their
place within a rigorous and consistent scientific world
view. As this watershed book shows, the end of certainty
is the birth of a whole new formulation of the natural laws
of both science and culture.
Viscount Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize
winner in chemistry, is the Director of the Ilya Prigogine
Center of Statistical Mechanics, Thermodynamics and Complex
Systems in Austin, Texas, and the Director of the Solvay
Institutes of Physics and Chemistry in Brussels. The recipient
of honorary degrees from more than forty universities around
the world, Prigogine has had five institutes devoted to
the study of complex systems named for him. He lives in
Brussels and Austin.
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