The End Of Certainty: Time, Chaos, And The New Laws Of Nature

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. Glossary.

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.