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Loading... Order Out of Chaos (1984)by Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers, Isabelle Stengers
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. A classic. Worth reading and re-reading (even though I gave it only 4 stars ... it's really closer to 4.5). ( ) 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. A thorough, but sometimes dense introduction to non-equilibrium thermodynamics. The author raises some interesting issues, especially with respect to the concept of time. The main problems with the book are some of the connections between philosophy, sociology and natural science, which seem quite a stretch, and the final chapters, which are supposed to show that the "arrow of time" exists at the microscopic scale, but fail to be convincing. no reviews | add a review
Belongs to Publisher SeriesRadical Thinkers (123 - Set 15(3))
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. No library descriptions found.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)501Natural sciences and mathematics General Science Philosophy and theoryLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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