In this book, after discussing the fundamental problems of current science and other philosophic concepts, beginning with controversies between Heraclitus and Parmenides, Ilya Prigogine launches into a message of great hope: the future has not been determined. Contrary to globalisation and the apparent contemporary mass culture society, individual behaviour is beginning to increasingly become the key factor which governs the evolution of both the world and society as a whole. It is a message that challenges existing widespread views, implicitly or explicitly, through mass communication; moreover the importance of the individual's actions implies a reflection of each person on the responsibilities that each one assumes when taking or acting upon a decision. This responsibility is associated with the freedom of thought as well as a critical analysis of fashions, customs, preconceived ideas, and ideologies, externally imposed: exactly contrary to the ideas of those who wish us to be "perfect consumers" in a world dominated only by monetary wealth. Challenging this drive towards the elimination of freedom of thought in the individual is now imperative if we are to save man and his planet from catastrophe, which seems to be ever imminent and (unfortunately) irreversible. This last book of Ilya Prigogine provides a small, disputable, but nonetheless valuable contribution towards that end.

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.

Market: Students and researchers in chaos, plasma physics, and fluid transport. This superb collection of invited papers offers an excellent overview of the current status and future trends in chaotic dynamics, plasma and fluid physics, nonlinear phenomena and chaos, and transport and turbulence studies.

The new edition will provide the sole comprehensive resource available for non-linear optics, including detailed descriptions of the advances over the last decade from world-renowned experts.

Monographs In Statistical Physics And Thermodynamics, Volume 3.

Monographs In Statistical Physics And Thermodynamics, Volume 3.

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.

The author looks forward to a time when the civilization of war will be replaced by a culture of peace, based on a culture of democracy; a world where individuals work and create and invent the texture of their lives in their local communities, freed from the fears of the war-culture. Nelson Mandela, F.W. De Klerk, Yasser Arafat and Mikhail Gorbachev are used as examples of people who are moving forward and challenging routine and the system. The author argues that to write a new page we must re-dedicate ourselves to the ethical force of peace rather than the coercive force of war. Only by striving for a new renaissance locally, nationally, and internationally, can perceptions and actions determine the shape of things to come.