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The End of Certainty
by Ilya Prigogine
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Hardcover: 240 pages
Publisher: Free Press; 1 (August 17 1997)
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Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1: Epicurus' Dilemma
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.



Book Description

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.

About the Author

Ilya PrigogineIlya Prigogine

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.

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