Letter from Lhasa, number 134. (Prigogine 2003): Is Future Given?
by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi
Prigogine, I., Is Future Given?, World Scientific, 2003.
(Prigogine 2003).
Ilya Prigogine
This is one of the usual commercial books built around short essays and other materials of the personage Prigogine. However, the Prigogine materials are always interesting and useful.
His first essays here, Is Future Given? Changes in Our Description of Nature, is a Prigogine's lecture in Athens, on 26 May 2000. In it, he drives you to the new world, if you already did not know it, of non-integrable systems. It is a probabilistic world, different from the classical mechanics' one.
His second essay, with I. Antoniou, Laws of Nature and Time Symmetry Breaking, deals with irreversibility. In it, the authors drive the readers from a deterministic world to a probabilistic one, from being to becoming. It is useless to deal with it without some deep mathematical understanding in the required fields. Just for reading the conclusions... A probabilistic world is not better than a deterministic one. They are only two different dimensions, not even radically alternative. They are generally combined. Although, for formally dealing with a probabilistic world, one needs additional and different instruments sometimes to be invented or not yet fully available to the scientists’ world. Probability, in these fields, is inevitably an obliged exemplification of possible realities. Prigogine and similar authors have opened a door. Other tools, new languages, different from the ones used from them, would be necessary for fully dealing with a world where everything becomes possible.
Time in Non-equilibrium Physics is a discussion of Prigogine with Theodore Christidis. It is about the mystery of the distinction of earlier and later. Actually, it is not a mystery for common sense. However, in science, it is.
Time in the Epistemology of Complexity is a discussion of Prigogine with Ioannis Zisis. Prigogine wants again to appear as a philosopher, what certainly he is but not because he quotes Parmenides and Heraclitus. Far from equilibrium => bifurcations => appearing of newness: the arrow of time is this irreversible succession of events. It is interesting the underlying that gravitation is what disturbs equilibrium, what keeps far from equilibrium.
Life and the Internet is a discussion of Prigogine with Maria Adamidou. “How can there be order out of chaos” is a classic of the Prigogine research. Here there are only a few remarks.
There is another couple of pieces of writing.
If you want something “heavier” (by the same Prigogine), there is on internet, perhaps even free if you can find it.
Prigogine, I., Is Future Given?, World Scientific, 2003.
