Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

by Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers, Alvin Toffler (Foreword by)

Overview

A pioneering book that shows how the two great themes of classic science, order and chaos, are being reconciled in a new and unexpected synthesis

Order Out of Chaos is a sweeping critique of the discordant landscape of modern scientific knowledge. In this landmark book, Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine and acclaimed philosopher Isabelle Stengers offer an exciting and accessible account of the philosophical implications of thermodynamics. Prigogine and Stengers bring contradictory philosophies of time and chance into a novel and ambitious synthesis. Since its first publication in France in 1978, this book has sparked debate among physicists, philosophers, literary critics and historians.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786631008
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	01/23/2018
Series:	Radical Thinkers
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Isabelle Stengers is a professor of philosophy at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her publications include Cosmopolitics. She received the Grand Prize for Philosophy from the Académie Française in 1993.

Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) was a Belgian physical chemist noted for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems and irreversibility. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1977.

Table of Contents

Foreword: Science and Change Alvin Toffler xi

Preface: Man's New Dialogue with Nature xxvii

Introduction: The Challenge to Science 1

Book 1 The Delusion of the Universal

Chapter I The Triumph of Reason 27

1 The New Moses 27

2 A Dehumanized World 30

3 The Newtonian Synthesis 37

4 The Experimental Dialogue 41

5 The Myth at the Origin of Science 44

6 The Limits of Classical Science 51

Chapter II The Identification of the Real 57

1 Newton's Laws 57

2 Motion and Change 62

3 The Language of Dynamics 68

4 Laplace's Demon 75

Chapter III The Two Cultures 79

1 Diderot and the Discourse of the Living 79

2 Kant's Critical Ratification 86

3 A Philosophy of Nature? Hegel and Bergson 89

4 Process and Reality: Whitehead 93

5 "Ignoramus, Ignoramibus": The Positivist's Strain 96

6 A New Start 98

Book 2 The Science of Complexity

Chapter IV Energy and the Industrial Age 103

1 Heat, the Rival of Gravitation 103

2 The Principle of the Conservation of Energy 107

3 Heat Engines and the Arrow of Time 111

4 From Technology to Cosmology 115

5 The Birth of Entropy 117

6 Boltzmann's Order Principle 122

7 Carnot and Darwin 127

Chapter V The Three Stages of Thermodynamics 131

1 Flux and Force 131

2 Linear Thermodynamics 137

3 Far from Equilibrium 140

4 Beyond the Threshold of Chemical Instability 146

5 The Encounter with Molecular Biology 153

6 Bifurcations and Symmetry-Breaking 160

7 Cascading Bifurcations and the Transitions to Chaos 167

8 From Euclid to Aristotle 171

Chapter VI Order Through Fluctuations 177

1 Fluctuations and Chemistry 177

2 Fluctuations and Correlations 179

3 The Amplification of Fluctuations 181

4 Structural Stability 189

5 Logistic Evolution 192

6 Evolutionary Feedback 196

7 Modelizations of Complexity 203

8 An Open World 207

Book 3 From Being to Becoming

Chapter VII Rediscovering Time 213

1 A Change of Emphasis 213

2 The End of Universality 217

3 The Rise of Quantum Mechanics 218

4 Heisenberg's Uncertainty Relation 222

5 The Temporal Evolution of Quantum Systems 226

6 A Nonequilibrium Universe 229

Chapter VIII The Clash of Doctrines 233

1 Probability and Irreversibility 233

2 Boltzmann's Breakthrough 240

3 Questioning Boltzamann's Interpretation 243

4 Dynamics and Thermodynamics: Two Separate Worlds 247

5 Boltzmann and the Arrow of Time 253

Chapter IX Irreversibility-the Entropy Barrier 257

1 Entropy and the Arrow of Time 257

2 Irreversibility as a Symmetry-Breaking Process 260

3 The Limits of Classical Concepts 261

4 The Renewal of Dynamics 264

5 From Randomness to Irrevrsibility 272

6 The Entropy Barrier 277

7 The Dynamics of Correlations 280

8 Entropy as a Selection Principle 285

9 Active Matter 286

Conclusions: From Earth to Heaven-the Reenchantment of Nature 291

1 An Open Science 291

2 Time and Times 293

3 The Entropy Barrier 295

4 The Evolutionary Paradigm 297

5 Actors and Spectators 298

6 A Whirlwind in a Turbulent Nature 301

7 Beyond Tautology 305

8 The Creative Course of Time 307

9 The Human Condition 311

10 The Renewal of Nature 312

Notes 315

Index 335

Editorial Reviews

A passionate meditation on Man and Universe.”
—Italo Calvino

“Astonishingly ambitious and wide-ranging.”
—Observer

“An ambitious book which suggests that a new picture of the universe is emerging from the study of thermodynamics, and that this picture will heal the breach between the scientific and the poetic view of man.”
—John Maynard Smith, London Review of Books

“Brilliant, demanding, dazzling.”
—Alvin Toffler

From the Publisher