The End of Certainty:

Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature

Written by Ilya Prigogine
(New Yor : The !ree Press, "##$, %%& 'ages(

)e*iewed by +ally ,orem

In his latest book, Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine examines times constructive role in the evolution of matter, of life, and of human culture. Prigogines study of chaos and self-organizing systems is a sustained effort to overthrow the stranglehold that the conce t of determinism has had over !estern science, hiloso hy, and theology since the era of the re-"ocratic #reeks. $e asks, %Is the future given or is it under er etual construction&' (s a la sed Presbyterian, I can sym athize with his struggle with this scientific version of )alvinistic redestination. *he roblem, sim ly 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& *o get at this conundrum, Prigogine enlists the aid of an unlikely ally, entro y. -ntro y lays a very different role in Prigogines universe than in the well-noted "econd .aw of *hermodynamics. *o Prigogine, entro y is the arrow of time that brings order and life to the universe, not a sentence of heat death. /ur evolutionary universe changes every moment, each state built u on what receded it. )ause and effect are left intact in this indeterministic universe0 chance leaves the system o en at every fork in the ath of change to truly novel systems and structures.

Probabilities sha e the Prigoginian universe. 1nlike the oversim lified model of interacting articles over a short eriod of time osited by traditional hysics, Prigogine understands that in the real universe large numbers of articles interact with each other over a long eriod of time. *hey create a history of interrelationshi s,a kind of rimitive %memory.' In short, ersistent interactions lead to self-organizing systems of great creative ower. %2nowledge resu oses 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 ast and future. 3ecoming is the sine 4ua non of science, and indeed of knowledge itself.' Prigogine is saying that there is something extremely odd about the determinism of traditional hysics, a aradigm that,in effect, redicts the non-existence of science and scientists5 3ut Prigogine goes even further than this. $e suggests that the arrow of time is so fundamental to existence that it actually recedes the birth of the universe itself. $ow could this ossibly be& If the 3ig 3ang resulted from fluctuations in a rimeval 4uantum vacuum, as several noted cosmologists have suggested, time could exist in this vacuum, this metauniverse in which universes are born. *ime would have always been and would always be. !e do not live in a redestined world then0 neither do we live in a world of ure chance. !e live in a world in which chance creates novelty and in which lawful chains of cause and effect conserve the resulting attern. )reative chance iles novelty on to of novelty. .awfulness orders these into a many-leveled self-organized whole. Prigogines scientific dialogue with nature reveals to us an edifice of ever-changing, every-growing turrets and ara ets0 a natural result of the un lanned, unguided, creative ower embedded in the universe itself.