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    Sally Morem
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    This book review of Prigogine's book deals with his work on chaos and complexity theory, time, entropy, and a freely evolving universe. It lies close to the core of my belief in the universe as a Grassroots Creation.

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    This book review of Prigogine's book deals with his work on chaos and complexity theory, time, entropy, and a freely evolving universe. It lies close to the core of my belief in the universe as a Grassroots Creation.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    6K views2 pages

    The End of Certainty Prigogine

    Uploaded by

    Sally Morem
    This book review of Prigogine's book deals with his work on chaos and complexity theory, time, entropy, and a freely evolving universe. It lies close to the core of my belief in the universe as a Grassroots Creation.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    of 2

    The End of Certainty:

    Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature


    Written by Ilya Prigogine
    (New York: The Free Press, 1997, 228 pages)

    Reviewed by Sally Morem


    In his latest book, Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine examines time’s
    constructive role in the evolution of matter, of life, and of human
    culture.

    Prigogine’s study of chaos and self-organizing systems is a sustained


    effort to overthrow the stranglehold that the concept of determinism has
    had over Western science, philosophy, and theology since the era of the
    pre-Socratic Greeks. He asks, “Is the future given or is it under
    perpetual construction?” As a lapsed Presbyterian, I can sympathize
    with his struggle with this scientific version of Calvinistic
    predestination.

    The problem, simply stated, is as follows: If nothing is determined, how


    can lawful chains of cause and effect occur, but if everything is
    determined, what then of free will and creativity?

    To get at this conundrum, Prigogine enlists the aid of an unlikely ally—


    entropy. Entropy plays a very different role in Prigogine’s universe
    than in the well-noted Second Law of Thermodynamics. To Prigogine,
    entropy is the arrow of time that brings order and life to the universe,
    not a sentence of heat death. Our evolutionary universe changes every
    moment, each state built upon what preceded it. Cause and effect are
    left intact in this indeterministic universe; chance leaves the system
    open at every fork in the path of change to truly novel systems and
    structures.
    Probabilities shape the Prigoginian universe. Unlike the oversimplified
    model of interacting particles over a short period of time posited by
    traditional physics, Prigogine understands that in the real universe
    large numbers of particles interact with each other over a long period of
    time. They create a history of interrelationships—a kind of primitive
    “memory.” In short, persistent interactions lead to self-organizing
    systems of great creative power.

    “Knowledge presupposes that the world affects us and our instruments,


    that there is an interaction between the knower and the known, that this
    interaction creates a difference between past and future. Becoming is
    the sine qua non of science, and indeed of knowledge itself.”

    Prigogine is saying that there is something extremely odd about the


    determinism of traditional physics, a paradigm that—in effect—
    predicts the non-existence of science and scientists!

    But Prigogine goes even further than this. He suggests that the arrow of
    time is so fundamental to existence that it actually precedes the birth of
    the universe itself. How could this possibly be? If the Big Bang resulted
    from fluctuations in a primeval quantum vacuum, as several noted
    cosmologists have suggested, time could exist in this vacuum, this meta-
    universe in which universes are born. Time would have always been
    and would always be.

    We do not live in a predestined world then; neither do we live in a world


    of pure chance. We live in a world in which chance creates novelty and
    in which lawful chains of cause and effect conserve the resulting
    pattern. Creative chance piles novelty on top of novelty. Lawfulness
    orders these into a many-leveled self-organized whole.

    Prigogine’s scientific dialogue with nature reveals to us an edifice of


    ever-changing, every-growing turrets and parapets; a natural result of
    the unplanned, unguided, creative power embedded in the universe
    itself.

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