Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003)

This fascinating book covers the rise of understanding of our world from the protoscience of the ancient Greeks to the mid to late twentieth century. For a popular account, there is a surprising amount of detail given. Prigogine is a renowned chemist and Nobel laureate; Stengers is a philosopher chemist. Together they present fact, interpretation, opinion and speculation. There is a strong emphasis on the role of order and the direction of changes. As the book proceeds they become concerned with issues such as whether laws describes reversible or irreversible processes, how simple regularities can appear in non-equilibrium systems, how macroscopic outcomes can become undecidable, and whether entropy must always increase.

Indeed much of the work is devoted to discussing far-from-equilibrium behaviours of systems. With the hindsight of a modern perspective, it is hard to judge how this work would have been received when first published in French in 1979. Yet undoubtedly the book had its largest philosophical impact on the non-physical sciences. Indeed the authors should be praised for being so open about their speculations about time, life and social organization.… (more)