The End of Certainty: Time's Flow and the Laws of Nature
- Book Review,
by Ilya Prigogine
Amazon.com
In this intellectually challenging book, Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine tackles some of the difficult questions that bedevil physicists trying to provide an explanation for the world we observe. How is it, for instance, that basic principles of quantum mechanics--which lack any differentiation between forward and backward directions in time--can explain a world with an "arrow of time" headed unambiguously forward? And how do we escape classical physics' assertion that the world is deterministic? In a sometimes mathematical and frequently mind-bending book, Prigogine explores deterministic chaos, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, and even cosmology and the origin of the universe in an attempt to reach an explanation that can reconcile physical laws with subjective reality.
From Booklist
Since adolescence, Nobel laureate Prigogine has been haunted by the thorny problem of time, which has so preoccupied him that he scrawled "Time precedes existence" on a scientific memorial in Moscow. One of the founders of chaos theory, Prigogine has for decades propounded a view contrary to the assumption of temporal reversibility that is commonly accepted by theoretical physicists (ordinary folk have always been baffled by the idea that minus-t and plus-t [terms representing, respectively, time going backward and going forward] can somehow ever be the same). Although accepting relativity and the time-space continuum, Prigogine proposes a radical synthesis of Newtonian and quantum physics that is intriguing enough to reward the tough going that the book's intense concentration of formulas (on which Prigogine's arguments center) will be for most general readers. Prigogine claims that it is time's arrow that finally makes clear how probabilities become actualities and how "becoming" becomes "being." A groundbreaking work by a major figure in today's scientific revolution. Patricia Monaghan
From Kirkus Reviews
A Nobel Prizewinning chemist bridges science and philosophy in explaining how chaos theory shows that time is real and determinism untenable. To some, the title may misleadingly suggest a book about the hopelessness of knowing whether anything is real. In fact, Prigogine (coauthor, Order Out of Chaos, 1984, etc.) argues that one object of everyday belief--the irreversibility of events, or the arrow of time--is much more real than classical and quantum physics have allowed. According to Prigogine, most physicists, from Newton to Einstein to Stephen Hawking, have described the universe as deterministic and ``time-symmetrical''--with the corollary that time, probability, and free will can only be illusions resulting from human ignorance. Because that view conflicts with much of philosophy and common sense, it has contributed to the alienation of science from the rest of human culture. Prigogine moves toward ending that alienation by affirming the reality of time, arguing that advances in the physics of nonequilibrium processes and unstable systems now make it possible to revise the basic laws of physics ``in accordance with the open, evolving universe in which mankind lives.'' In passages dense with mathematics, Prigogine shows how probability and irreversibility affect particle interaction, thermodynamics, classical and quantum mechanics, and cosmology. The validity of these claims can only be judged by specialists; the general reader is given little aid in understanding them, much less in gauging how well they support the author's belief that ``we are actually at the beginning of a new scientific era.'' But the nonmathematical sections of the book concisely outline Prigogine's brand of realism: one in which actions have meaning and creativity is prized because consequences are real and the future cannot be predicted. A blend of philosophy and physics that will stir both specialists and nonspecialists to think freshly about what is real. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
Oliver Sacks"Prigogine is a pioneer of chaos and self-organization theory, and his vision is as revolutionary and fundamental as Darwin's. With a fascinating blend of the conceptual, historical, and personal, he gives us a rare and privileged glimpse into one of the most adventurous scientific imaginations of our time."
Review
Oliver Sacks "Prigogine is a pioneer of chaos and self-organization theory, and his vision is as revolutionary and fundamental as Darwin's. With a fascinating blend of the conceptual, historical, and personal, he gives us a rare and privileged glimpse into one of the most adventurous scientific imaginations of our time."
Book Description
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.
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French
Card catalog description
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.
Simon & Schuster
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.END
About the Author
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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