The End of Certainty (Hardcover)

In this intellectually challenging book, Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine tackles some of the difficult questions that bedevil physicists trying to provide an explanation for the world we observe. How is it, for instance, that basic principles of quantum mechanics--which lack any differentiation between forward and backward directions in time--can explain a world with an "arrow of time" headed unambiguously forward? And how do we escape classical physics' assertion that the world is deterministic? In a sometimes mathematical and frequently mind-bending book, Prigogine explores deterministic chaos, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, and even cosmology and the origin of the universe in an attempt to reach an explanation that can reconcile physical laws with subjective reality.

Since adolescence, Nobel laureate Prigogine has been haunted by the thorny problem of time, which has so preoccupied him that he scrawled "Time precedes existence" on a scientific memorial in Moscow. One of the founders of chaos theory, Prigogine has for decades propounded a view contrary to the assumption of temporal reversibility that is commonly accepted by theoretical physicists (ordinary folk have always been baffled by the idea that minus-t and plus-t [terms representing, respectively, time going backward and going forward] can somehow ever be the same). Although accepting relativity and the time-space continuum, Prigogine proposes a radical synthesis of Newtonian and quantum physics that is intriguing enough to reward the tough going that the book's intense concentration of formulas (on which Prigogine's arguments center) will be for most general readers. Prigogine claims that it is time's arrow that finally makes clear how probabilities become actualities and how "becoming" becomes "being." A groundbreaking work by a major figure in today's scientific revolution. Patricia Monaghan

A Nobel Prizewinning chemist bridges science and philosophy in explaining how chaos theory shows that time is real and determinism untenable. To some, the title may misleadingly suggest a book about the hopelessness of knowing whether anything is real. In fact, Prigogine (coauthor, Order Out of Chaos, 1984, etc.) argues that one object of everyday belief--the irreversibility of events, or the arrow of time--is much more real than classical and quantum physics have allowed. According to Prigogine, most physicists, from Newton to Einstein to Stephen Hawking, have described the universe as deterministic and ``time-symmetrical''--with the corollary that time, probability, and free will can only be illusions resulting from human ignorance. Because that view conflicts with much of philosophy and common sense, it has contributed to the alienation of science from the rest of human culture. Prigogine moves toward ending that alienation by affirming the reality of time, arguing that advances in the physics of nonequilibrium processes and unstable systems now make it possible to revise the basic laws of physics ``in accordance with the open, evolving universe in which mankind lives.'' In passages dense with mathematics, Prigogine shows how probability and irreversibility affect particle interaction, thermodynamics, classical and quantum mechanics, and cosmology. The validity of these claims can only be judged by specialists; the general reader is given little aid in understanding them, much less in gauging how well they support the author's belief that ``we are actually at the beginning of a new scientific era.'' But the nonmathematical sections of the book concisely outline Prigogine's brand of realism: one in which actions have meaning and creativity is prized because consequences are real and the future cannot be predicted. A blend of philosophy and physics that will stir both specialists and nonspecialists to think freshly about what is real. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Oliver Sacks"Prigogine is a pioneer of chaos and self-organization theory, and his vision is as revolutionary and fundamental as Darwin's. With a fascinating blend of the conceptual, historical, and personal, he gives us a rare and privileged glimpse into one of the most adventurous scientific imaginations of our time."

Time, the fundamental dimension of our existence, has fascinated artists, philosophers, and scientists of every culture and every century. All of us can remember a moment as a child when time became a personal reality, when we realized what a "year" was, or asked ourselves when "now" happened. Common sense says time moves forward, never backward, from cradle to grave. Nevertheless, Einstein said that time is an illusion. Nature's laws, as he and Newton defined them, describe a timeless, deterministic universe within which we can make predictions with complete certainty. In effect, these great physicists contended that time is reversible and thus meaningless.

In The End of Certainty, world-renowned chemist Ilya Prigogine draws together probability and certainty, Einstein and Shakespeare, and chaos and complexity to explain why our fundamental beliefs about time are wrong. Prigogine's work formulates a groundbreaking link between instability and chaos and the evolutionary framework in which we exist. Illustrations.

Time, the fundamental dimension of our existence, has fascinated artists, philosophers, and scientists of every culture and every century. All of us can remember a moment as a child when time became a personal reality, when we realized what a "year" was, or asked ourselves when "now" happened. Common sense says time moves forward, never backward, from cradle to grave. Nevertheless, Einstein said that time is an illusion. Nature's laws, as he and Newton defined them, describe a timeless, deterministic universe within which we can make predictions with complete certainty. In effect, these great physicists contended that time is reversible and thus meaningless.END

Viscount Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, is the Director of the Ilya Prigogine Center of Statistical Mechanics, THermodynamics and Complex Systems in Austin, Texas, and the Director of the Solvay Institutes of Physics and Chemistry in Brussels. The recipient of honorary degrees from more than forty universities around the world, Prigogine has had five institutes devoted to the study of complex systems named for him. He lives in Brussels and Austin.

Excerpt from Chapter 1

Is the universe ruled by deterministic laws? What is the nature of time? These questions were formulated by the pre-Socratics at the very start of Western rationality. After more than twenty-five hundred years, they are still with us. However, recent developments in physics and mathematics associated with chaos and instability have opened up different avenues of investigation. We are beginning to see these problems, which deal with the very position of mankind in nature, in a new light, and can now avoid the contradictions of the past.

The Greek philosopher Epicurus was the first to address a fundamental dilemma. As a follower of Democritus, he believed that the world is made of atoms and the void. Moreover, he concluded, atoms fall through the void at the same speed and on parallel paths. How then could they collide? How could novelty associated with combinations of atoms ever appear? For Epicurus, the problems of science, the intelligibility of nature, and human destiny could not be separated. What could be the meaning of human freedom in a deterministic world of atoms? As Epicurus wrote to Meneceus, "Our will is autonomous and independent and to it we can attribute praise or disapproval. Thus, in order to keep our freedom, it would have been better to remain attached to the belief in gods rather than being slaves to the fate of the physicists: The former gives us the hope of winning the benevolence of deities through promise and sacrifices; the latter, on the contrary, brings with it an inviolable necessity." How contemporary this quotation sounds! Again and again, the greatest thinkers in Western tradition, such as Immanuel Kant, Alfred North Whitehead, and Martin Heidegger, felt that they had to make a tragic choice between an alienating science or an antiscientific philosophy. They attempted to find some compromise, but none proved to be satisfactory.

Epicurus thought that he had found a solution to this dilemma, which he termed the clinamen. As expressed by Lucretius, "While the first bodies are being carried downwards by their own weight in straight lines through the void, at times quite uncertain and at uncertain places, they deviate slightly from their course, just enough to be defined as having changed direction." ² But no mechanism was given for this clinamen. No wonder that it has always been considered a foreign, arbitrary element.

But do we need this novelty at all? For Heraclitus, as understood by Popper, "Truth lies in having grasped the essential becoming of nature, i.e., having represented it as implicitly infinite, as a process in itself"³ Parmenides took the opposite view. In his celebrated poem on the unique reality of existence, he wrote, "Nor was it ever, nor will it be, since now it is, all together."⁴

It is amusing that the Epicurus clinamen has appeared repeatedly in the science of our century. In his classic paper on the emission of photons associated with the transitions between atomic states (1916), Einstein explicitly expressed his confidence in scientific determinism, although he assumed that these emissions are ruled by chance.

Greek philosophy was unable to solve this dilemma. Plato linked truth with being, that is, with the unchanging reality beyond becoming. Yet he was conscious of the paradoxical character of this position because it would debase both life and thought. In The Sophist, he concluded that we need both being and becoming.⁵

This duality has plagued Western thought ever since. As observed by the French philosopher Jean Wahl, the history of Western philosophy is, on the whole, an unhappy one, characterized by perpetual oscillations between the world as an automaton and a theology in which God governs the universe.⁶ Both are forms of determinism.

This debate took a turn in the eighteenth century with the discovery of the "laws of nature." The foremost example was Newton's law relating force and acceleration, which was both deterministic and, more important, time reversible. Once we know the initial conditions, we can calculate all subsequent states as well as the preceding ones. Moreover, past and future play the same role because Newton's law is invariant with respect to the time inversion to » -t. This leads to nightmares such as the demon imagined by Pierre-Simon de Laplace, capable of observing the current state of the universe and predicting its evolution.⁷

As is well known, Newton's law has been superseded in the twentieth century by quantum mechanics and relativity. Still, the basic characteristics of his laws -- determinism and time symmetry -- have survived. It is true that quantum mechanics no longer deals with trajectories but with wave functions (see Section IV of this chapter and Chapter 6), but it is important to note that the basic equation of quantum mechanics, Schrödinger's equation, is once again deterministic and time reversible.

By way of such equations, laws of nature lead to certitudes. Once initial conditions are given, everything is determined. Nature is an automaton, which we can control, at least in principle. Novelty, choice, and spontaneous action are real only from our human point of view.

Many historians believe that an essential role in this vision of nature was played by the Christian God as conceived in the seventeenth century as an omnipotent legislator. Theology and science agreed. As Gottfried von Leibniz wrote, "In the least of substances, eyes as piercing as those of God could read the whole course of things in the universe, quae sint, quae fyerint, quae mox futura trahantur" (those which are, which have been, and which shall be in the future).⁸ The discovery of nature's deterministic laws was thus bringing human knowledge closer to the divine, atemporal point of view.

The concept of a passive nature subject to deterministic and time-reversible laws is quite specific to the Western world. In China and Japan, nature means "what is by itself." In his excellent book Science and Society in East and West, Joseph Needham tells us of the irony with which Chinese men of letters greeted the Jesuits' announcement of the triumphs of modern science.⁹ For them, the idea that nature is governed by simple, knowable laws seemed to be a perfect example of anthropocentric foolishness. According to Chinese tradition, nature is spontaneous harmony; speaking about "laws of nature" would thus subject nature to some external authority.

In a message to the great Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore, Einstein wrote:

If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal path round the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it would travel its path on its own, in accordance with a resolution taken once and for all.

So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about this illusion of his that he was acting according to his own free will.

This is my belief, although I know well that it is not fully demonstrable. If one thinks out to the very last consequence what one exactly knows and understands, there would hardly be any human being who could be impervious to this view, provided his self-love did not rub up against it. Man defends himself from being regarded as an impotent object in the course of the Universe. But should the lawfulness of happenings, such as unveils itself more and more clearly in inorganic nature, cease to function in the activities in our brain?¹⁰

To Einstein, this appeared to be the only position compatible with the achievements of science. But this conclusion is as difficult to accept now as it was to Epicurus. Time is our basic existential dimension. Since the nineteenth century, philosophy has become more and more time centered, as we see in the work of Georg Wilhelm Hegel, Edmund Husserl, William James, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, and Alfred North Whitehead. For physicists such as Einstein, the problem has been solved. For philosophers, it remains the central question of ontology, at the very basis of the meaning of human existence.

In The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism, Popper wrote, "I regard Laplacian determinism -- confirmed as it may seem to be by the prima facie deterministic theories of physics, and by their marvelous success -- as the most solid and serious obstacle to our understanding and justifying the nature of human freedom, creativity, and responsibility." For Popper, "The reality of time and change is the crux of realism." ¹¹

In his short essay, "The Possible and the Real," Bergson argued, "What is the role of time?... Time prevents everything from being given at once.... Is it not the vehicle of creativity and choice? Is not the existence of time the proof of indeterminism in nature?"¹² For both Popper and Bergson, we need "indeterminism." But how do we go beyond determinism? This difficulty is well analyzed in an essay by William James entitled "The Dilemma of Determinism."¹³ In accord with well-defined mechanisms, determinism is "mathematizable," as shown by the laws of nature formulated by Newton, Schrödinger, and Einstein. In contrast, deviations from determinism seem to introduce anthropomorphic concepts such as chance or accident.

The conflict between the time-reversible view of physics and time-centered philosophy has led to an open clash. What is the purpose of science if it cannot incorporate some of the basic aspects of human experience? The anti-scientific attitude of Heidegger is well known. Already Friedrich Nietzsche had concluded that there are no facts, only interpretations. As stated by John R. Searle, postmodern philosophy, with its idea of deconstruction, challenges Western traditions regarding the nature of truth, objectivity, and reality.¹⁴ In addition, the role of evolution, of events, in our description of nature is steadily increasing. How then can we maintain a ti...