Ilya Prigogine > Quotes

“We grow in direct proportion to the amount of chaos we can sustain and dissipate”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“Entropy is the price of structure.”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“The main character of any living system is openness.”
― Ilya Prigogine

“Order arise from chaos.”
― Ilya Prigogine

“one measure of a book is the degree to which it generates good questions,”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“Only when a system behaves in a sufficiently random way may the difference between past and future, and therefore irreversibility, enter its description.”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“Classical science, the mythical science of a simple, passive world, belongs to the past, killed not by philosophical criticism or empiricist resignation but by the internal development of science itself.”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“Where does the instability of the homogeneous come from? Why does it differentiate spontaneously? Why do things exist at all? Are they the fragile and mortal result of an injustice, a disequilibrium in the static equilibrium of forces between conflicting natural powers? Or do the forces that create and drive things exist autonomously—rival powers of love and hate leading to birth, growth, decline, and dispersion? Is change an illusion or is it, on the contrary, the unceasing struggle between opposites that constitutes things? Can qualitative change be reduced to the motion in a vacuum, of atoms differing only in their forms, or do atoms themselves consist of a multitude of qualitatively different germs, each unlike the others? And last, is the harmony of the world mathematical? Are numbers the key to nature?”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“The understanding of complexity and the use of the creativity of nature, the continuation of the work of nature are the grand challenges for the scientists of the 21st century.”
― Ilya Prigogine, Is Future Given?

“When one combines the new insights gained from studying far-from-equilibrium states and nonlinear processes, along with these complicated feedback systems, a whole new approach is opened that makes it possible to relate the so-called hard sciences to the softer sciences of life—and perhaps even to social processes as well. (Such findings have at least analogical significance for social, economic or political realities. Words like “revolution,” “economic crash,” “technological upheaval,” and “paradigm shift” all take on new shades of meaning when we begin thinking of them in terms of fluctuations, feedback amplification, dissipative structures, bifurcations, and the rest of the Prigoginian conceptual vocabulary.) It is these panoramic vistas that are opened to us by Order Out of Chaos.”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“on the conviction that nature responds to experimental interrogation.”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“The irreversibility of time is the mechanism that brings order out of chaos.”
― Ilya Prigogine

“Examples of such self-reorganization abound in Order Out of Chaos. Heat moving evenly through a liquid suddenly, at a certain threshold, converts into a convection current that radically reorganizes the liquid, and millions of molecules, as if on cue, suddenly form themselves into hexagonal cells.”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“… one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is flight from everyday life with its painful harshness and wretched dreariness, and from the fetters of one’s own shifting desires. A person with a finer sensibility is driven to escape from personal existence and to the world of objective observing (Schauen) and understanding. This motive can be compared with the longing that irresistibly pulls the town-dweller away from his noisy, cramped quarters and toward the silent, high mountains, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and traces the calm contours that seem to be made for eternity.”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“Nature is change, the continual elaboration of the new, a totality being created in an essentially open process of development without any preestablished model. “Life progresses and endures in time.”16 The only part of this progression that intelligence can grasp is what it succeeds in fixing in the form of manipulable and calculable elements and in referring to a time seen as sheer juxtaposition of instants.”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“Stahl criticized the metaphor of the automaton because, unlike a living being, the purpose of an automaton does not lie within itself; its organization is imposed upon it by its maker.”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“Only when a system behaves in a sufficiently random way may the difference between past and future, and therefore irreversibility, enter into its description...The arrow of time is the manifestation of the fact that the future is not given, that, as the French poet Paul Valery emphasized, 'time is a construction'.”
― Ilya Prigogine

“Moreover, each culture and each person tends to think in terms of “time horizons.” Some of us think only of the immediate—the now. Politicians, for example, are often criticized for seeking only immediate, short-term results. Their time horizon is said to be influenced by the date of the next election. Others among us plan for the long term. These differing time horizons are an overlooked source of social and political friction—perhaps among the most important. But despite the growing recognition that cultural conceptions of time differ, the social sciences have developed little in the way of a coherent theory of time.”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“if Prigogine and Stengers are right and chance plays its role at or near the point of bifurcation, after which deterministic processes take over once more until the next bifurcation, are they not embedding chance, itself, within a deterministic framework? By assigning a particular role to chance, don’t they de-chance it?”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“children in an industrial society are “time trained”—they learn to read the clock, and they learn to distinguish even quite small slices of time, as when their parents tell them, “You’ve only got three more minutes till bedtime!” These sharply honed temporal skills are often absent in slower-moving agrarian societies that require less precision in daily scheduling than our time-obsessed society.”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“Each society, as I’ve written elsewhere, betrays its own characteristic “time bias”—the degree to which it places emphasis on past, present, or future. One lives in the past. Another may be obsessed with the future.”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“according to the Second Law, there is an inescapable loss of energy in the universe. And, if the world machine is really running down and approaching the heat death, then it follows that one moment is no longer exactly like the last. You cannot run the universe backward to make up for entropy. Events over the long term cannot replay themselves. And this means that there is a directionality or, as Eddington later called it, an “arrow” in time.”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“The problem on which Newtonian physics concentrates is the calculation of this second derivative, that is, of the acceleration undergone at each instant by the points that form a system. The motion of each of these points over a finite interval of time can then be calculated by integration, by adding up the infinitesimal velocity changes occurring during this interval. The simplest case is when a is constant (for example, for a freely falling body a is the gravitational constant g). Generally speaking, acceleration itself varies in time, and the physicist’s task is to determine precisely the nature of this variation.”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“That probability could play a role in the description of complex phenomena was not surprising: Maxwell himself appears to have been influenced by the work of Quetelet, the inventor of the “average” man in sociology. The innovation was to introduce probability in physics not as a means of approximation but rather as an explanatory principle, to use it to show that a system could display a new type of behavior by virtue of its being composed of a large population to which the laws of probability could be applied.”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“The ancient philosophers had already pointed out that any natural process can be interpreted in many different ways in terms of the motion of and collisions between atoms. This was not a problem for the atomists, since their main aim was to describe a godless, law less world in which man is free and can expect to receive neither punishment nor reward from any divine or natural order. But classical science was a science of engineers and astronomers, a science of action and prediction. Speculations based on hypothetical atoms could not satisfy its needs. In contrast, Newton’s law provided a means of predicting and manipulating. Nature thus becomes law-abiding, docile, and predictable, instead of being chaotic, unruly, and stochastic.”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“One of the key controversies surrounding this concept has to do with Prigogine’s insistence that order and organization can actually arise “spontaneously” out of disorder and chaos through a process of “self-organization.” To grasp this extremely powerful idea, we first need to make a distinction between systems that are in “equilibrium,” systems that are “near equilibrium,” and systems that are “far from equilibrium.”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“Prigogine and Stengers also undermine conventional views of thermodynamics by showing that, under nonequilibrium conditions, at least, entropy may produce, rather than degrade, order, organization—and therefore life. If this is so, then entropy, too, loses its either/or character. While certain systems run down, other systems simultaneously evolve and grow more coherent. This mutualistic, nonexclusive view makes it possible for biology and physics to coexist rather than merely contradict one another.”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“The incompatibility between the ascetic beauty sought after by science, on the one hand, and the petty swirl of worldly experience so keenly felt by Einstein, on the other, is likely to be reinforced by another incompatibility, this one openly Manichean, between science and society, or, more precisely, between free human creativity and political power. In this case, it is not in an isolated community or in a temple that research would have to be carried out, but in a fortress, or else in a madhouse,”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature

“Le possible est plus riche que le réel. La nature nous présente en effet l’image de la création, de l’imprévisible nouveauté. Notre univers a suivi un chemin de bifurcations successives : il aurait pu en suivre d’autres. Peut-être pouvons-nous en dire autant pour la vie de chacun d’entre nous.”
― Ilya Prigogine, La Fin des certitudes : Temps, chaos et les lois de la nature

“Needham comments that, according to a philosophic conception dominant in China, the cosmos is in spontaneous harmony and the regularity of phenomena is not due to any external authority. On the contrary, this harmony in nature, society, and the heavens originates from the equilibrium among these processes. Stable and interdependent, they resonate with each other in a kind of nonconcerted harmony.”
― Ilya Prigogine, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature