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

Description

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.

Isabelle Stengers is a professor of philosophy at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. Trained as a chemist and philosopher, her publications include Cosmopolitics, a comprehensive reconsideration of the entire history of modern science from Galileo to contemporary complexity theory. She received the grand prize for philosophy from the Academie Francaise in 1993. Viscount Ilya Romanovich Prigogine 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.

(in praise of The End of Certainty) Prigogine is a pioneer of chaos and self-organization theory, and his vision is as revolutionary and fundamental as Darwin's. -- Oliver Sacks This is an ambitious book which suggests that a new picture of the universe is emerging from the study of thermodynamics, and that this picture will heal the breach between the scientific and the poetic view of man. -- John Maynard Smith * London Review of Books * An astonishingly ambitious and wide-ranging bookwhich reaches deep not only into physical and chemical theory, but also intothe history and philosophy of science * Observer * A book filled with flashing insights that subvertmany of our most basic assumptions and suggest fresh ways to think about them...brilliant, demanding, dazzling -- Alvin Toffler A passionate meditation on Man and Universe -- Italo Calvino