Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

Voorkant
Verso Books, 23 jan 2018 - 384 pagina's
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.
 

Geselecteerde pagina's

Inhoudsopgave

The Challenge to Science
1
The Triumph of Reason
27
The Identification of the Real
57
The Two Cultures
79
Energy and the Industrial Age
103
The Principle of the Conservation of Energy
107
Heat Engines and the Arrow of Time
111
From Technology to Cosmology
115
Heisenbergs Uncertainty Relation
222
The Temporal Evolution of Quantum Systems
226
A Nonequilibrium Universe
229
The Clash of Doctrines
233
Boltzmanns Breakthrough
240
Questioning Boltzmanns Interpretation
243
Two Separate Worlds
247
Boltzmann and the Arrow of Time
253

The Birth of Entropy
117
Boltzmanns Order Principle
122
Carnot and Darwin
127
The Three Stages of Thermodynamics
131
Linear Thermodynamics
137
Far from Equilibrium
140
Beyond the Threshold of Chemical Instability
146
The Encounter with Molecular Biology
153
Bifurcations and SymmetryBreaking
160
Cascading Bifurcations and the Transitions to Chaos
167
From Euclid to Aristotle
171
Order Through Fluctuations
177
Fluctuations and Correlations
179
The Amplification of Fluctuations
181
Structural Stability
189
Logistic Evolution
192
Evolutionary Feedback
196
Modelizations of Complexity
203
An Open World
207
From Being to Becoming
211
Rediscovering Time
213
The End of Universality
217
The Rise of Quantum Mechanics
218
Irreversibilitythe Entropy Barrier
257
Irreversibility as a SymmetryBreaking Process
260
The Limits of Classical Concepts
261
The Renewal of Dynamics
264
From Randomness to Irreversibility
272
The Entropy Barrier
277
The Dynamics of Correlations
280
Entropy as a Selection Principle
285
Active Matter
286
From Earth to Heaven the Reenchantment of Nature
291
Time and Times
293
The Entropy Barrier
295
The Evolutionary Paradigm
297
Actors and Spectators
298
A Whirlwind in a Turbulent Nature
301
Beyond Tautology
305
The Creative Course of Time
307
The Human Condition
311
The Renewal of Nature
312
NOTES
315
INDEX
335
Copyright

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Over de auteur (2018)

Isabelle Stengers is a professor of philosophy at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her publications include Cosmopolitics. She received the Grand Prize for Philosophy from the Académie Française in 1993.

Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) was a Belgian physical chemist noted for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems and irreversibility. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1977.

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