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A Crucial Piece of the Puzzle, Sep 1 2001
Many people presume that the integration of various domains of science into a single unified "superscience" will ultimately show that everything reduces to physics. In fact, one earlier reviewer of "The End of Certainty" closed his review saying, "Biology is, in the end, physics." There is a way in which biology could be "reduced" to physics, but only if we learn to define "physics" very differently than we do today. Prigogine shows why biology CANNOT be reduced to context-independent, deterministic contemporary physics. (Read Robert Rosen's "Essays on Life Itself" for the most profound and fundamental explanation, based on non-integrable, complex, "impredicative loops of efficient causation".) "The End of Certainty" is an important work because it points toward a revolutionary realignment of fundamental physical principles, theoretical perspectives, and even scientific methodology. In fact, it draws together many of the crucial elements that ultimately will result in the inevitable emergence of a fundamentally transformed model of scientific epistemology. It's an important snapshot of a pivotal stage in the evolution of scientific knowledge. There has not been a coherent major shift in the foundational paradigms of physical science since the emergence of relativity and quantum physics in the early 20th century. The pioneers of those physical models, if not the models themselves, behaved as feuding brothers from the start. That disputatious relationship is perhaps best typified by Einstein's famous rebuke of the indeterminacy of quantum physics: "God does not play dice with the universe." As usual, the enhanced perspective offered by an additional century of scientific enterprise shows us that neither side in the quantum dispute had an exclusive lock on the truth. If nothing else, Prigogine's work is a masterfully conceived reminder that we are fortunate to live in a time when a vastly larger shift in scientific world-view is imminent. This book's importance derives from its elegant (though highly technical) presentation of so many of the founding elements of what Erwin Schrödinger predicted would constitute a "new type of physical law". In fact, the controversy between Einstein's perspective and the views of quantum physicists like Schrödinger-a controversy that once commanded so much attention-has faded into an historical amusement. Instead, our advantage in standing on their shoulders is that, with the benefit of teachers like Ilya Prigogine, we can see beyond their semantic squabbles. It turns out that their views were congruent in at least one significant respect: both Einstein and Schrödinger knew that contemporary physics is inadequate to explain more complex phenomena...like biological life. That congruence is obvious in comparing Schrödinger's statement-"We must be prepared to find a new type of physical law prevailing in (the structure of living matter)."-with Einstein's equivalent assertion-"One can best feel in dealing with living things how primitive physics still is." Their scientific integrity and humbling lack of intellectual arrogance put all of contemporary physics on notice to expect the revolution whose epistemological lineage runs straight through Prigogine, who drops the other shoe in "The End of Certainty" when he irrevocably shatters the myth of time-reversible real-world processes. In doing so, he permanently exorcises "Laplace's demon", Pierre-Simon de Laplace's mythical entity that would be able, if physical processes were reversible and the precise position and momentum of every particle in the universe were known at any instant in time, to calculate the entire past history and future evolutionary state of the universe. You'll sense the evolution of physics itself when Prigogine delivers some founding concepts of the new physics: time-irreversibility, far-from-equilibrium metastability, and the self-organizing nature of complex systems. He writes, "Once we include these concepts, we come to a new formulation of the laws of nature, one that is no longer built on certitudes, as is the case for deterministic laws, but rather on possibilities." "The End of Certainty" is somewhat easier to assimilate than Prigogine's earlier works. Nevertheless, if you don't have a formal background in physics, you might find some parts of this book to be fairly rough going. Don't let that discourage you; focus on Chapter 1, Sections I through III. You'll find phenomenal insights there, like Prigogine's explanation of Henri Poincaré's proof that contemporary physics' belief in reversible, closed-system, deterministic modeling actually precludes the arrow of time, obviates self-organization, and prohibits the existence of life itself. In short, Prigogine shows that Poincaré proved that biology CANNOT be reduced to contemporary physics, and he even proved why (the existence of Poincaré resonances). It's an exquisitely beautiful insight. "The End of Certainty" is not a deeply controversial book, at least not among credible scientific minds. Prigogine's work is revolutionary in many ways, but it is neither disputatious nor provocatively unorthodox. It's too rigorously tied to mainstream science to suffer the kind of rejection that a less credible or less elegantly constructed work would invite. Even if it is not fully understood by contemporary physicists, neither is it seriously challenged or disputed. His work is so overwhelmingly supported by empirical underpinnings as to be incontestable. The Nobel Prize committee concurred; as a Nobel Laureate for his work in dissipative systems, Prigogine is well respected in the world of cutting edge physics. He's the E.F. Hutton of the new physics; when he talks, serious scientists listen. A final word: Don't sweat it if you're intimidated by some of the mathematics and graphics in "The End of Certainty". Don't worry about what you might be missing if you don't assimilate every bit of it. I didn't have to get it all on the first reading, and neither do you. In fact, you don't need to understand any of the mathematics or geometry to get value out of the non-technical portions of the text, which constitute the majority of the book. The only prerequisites for getting value from this book are literacy, an open mind, moderate intelligence, and a burn to understand the natural world. If you qualify, you're in for an illuminating perspective when you read it.
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