Order out of ChaosIlya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers, and Heinz R. Pagels Citation: Phys. Today 38(1), 97 (1985); doi: 10.1063/1.2813716 View online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.2813716 View Table of Contents: http://www.physicstoday.org/resource/1/PHTOAD/v38/i1 Published by the American Institute of Physics. Additional resources for Physics TodayHomepage: http://www.physicstoday.org/ Information: http://www.physicstoday.org/about_us Daily Edition: http://www.physicstoday.org/daily_edition

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Is die irreversibility we see a fundamental property of nature?Order Out of Chaosby llya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers349 pp., Bantam, New York, 1984. $8.95Reviewed by Heinz R. PagelsDeath, an inevitable and irreversibleevent, reveals the inexorable move-ment of time from the past to thefuture. The observation of the gradualdeterioration of all things, the tenden-cy for order to lapse into disorderillustrates what physicists call "time'sarrow"—the irreversibility of time.We can certainly determine whether amovie of our macroscopic world isshown backwards.

Yet, if we were able to see a movie ofthe interactions of atoms and mole-cules, we would not be able to tellwhether it is shown backwards becausethe fundamental laws of motion formicroscopic particles are indifferent tothe direction of time; from a microscop-ic viewpoint, death appears to be anillusion. How is it possible then, thatfrom the microworld of reversible timeemerges the observed macroworld ofirreversible time?

This profound question, first ad-dressed by the nineteenth centuryphysicist Ludwig Boltzmann, becameone of the great themes of the physicalsciences. Boltzmann mathematicallydemonstrated that a statistical proper-ty, called the total entropy, alwaysincreased in time for an isolated phys-ical system containing a large numberof particles, thus giving time its arrow.According to Boltzmann, irreversibletime emerges as an objective macro-scopic property of a large number ofparticles, each moving in accordancewith time-reversible laws of motion. Inthe century following Boltzmann'swork, his viewpoint has been profound-ly deepened; but it has never beendisproven.

The origin of irreversible time is thecentral theme of the well-written andengaging book Order Out of Chaos by

Heinz R. Pagels is Executive Director of theNew York Academy of Sciences and a theo-retical physicist at Rockefeller University. Heis the author of The Cosmic Code and aforthcoming book on the origin of the universe.

mathematical physicist llya Prigogineand Isabelle Stengers. The book isdivided into three parts. The first,"The Delusion of the Universal," is aphilosophical history of physics withquotations from Kant, Diderot, Hegel,Bergson and Whitehead, among others.These citations from eminent philos-ophers sound somewhat like that of anineffectual chorus before the unfoldingdrama of modern science. The authorstake issue with the reductionist tenden-cy of science, what they call "the basicmyth of science," held by most contem-porary scientists, including Einstein.In Einstein's words, this "myth" is theview that the "the general laws ofphysics . . . claim to be valid for anynatural phenomena whatsoever" andthat "it ought to be possible to arrive at

the description . . . of every natural pro-cess, including life, by means of purededuction."

The final two parts of the bookattempt to provide the scientific sup-port for the integrative philosophyespoused by the authors. In the secondpart, "The Science of Complexity," onefinds clear descriptions of experimentsand theoretical models that serve as anintroduction to the formidable subjectsof statistical mechanics, nonlinear dy-namics and the study of physical sys-tems far from equilibrium. But mostphysicists who devote their lives tothese subjects will find their treatmentdisturbing. For while this book con-tains much that is new and correct, alltoo often that which is correct is notnew and that which is new is not

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correct.Prigogine had the good taste to work

upon the most profound problems inphysics. To his own surprise (as notedin the foreword) and that of otherscientists, he received the Nobel Prizein chemistry in 1977. In collaborationwith P. Glansdorff, he devised "TheUniversal Evolution Criterion," whichwas misinterpreted by some scientiststo be an important generalization tofar-from-equilibrium systems of earliermathematical work of Boltzmann andLars Onsager (the Norwegian physi-cist) on close-to-equilibrium thermody-namic systems. But, already in 1974, itwas clear from the critical work of theAmericans Ronald Fox and Joel Keizerthat this "universal criterion" was notuniversal. Much to his credit, Prigo-gine in this book finally abandons hisclaim to have found a universal crite-rion, which figures prominently in hisprevious writings. Reversing his pre-vious view completely, he writes, "Incontrast with close-to-equilibrium sit-uations, the behavior of a far-from-equilibrium system becomes highlyspecific."

The idea that living organisms areexamples of self-organizing physicalsystems is not new. Boltzmann, whoadmired Darwin's evolutionary theory,described the leaves of a tree growingin sunlight as examples of organizingopen systems. Alan Turing, the Eng-lish mathematical genius, began themodern theory of chemical self-organi-zation in his 1952 seminal paper, "TheChemical Basis of Morphogenesis."This work is referred to in one sentencein this book. The main idea is that ifthe physical parameters that charac-terize chemical reactions that mightoccur in an organism exceed criticalvalues, then the reactions may exhibitunusual "self-organizing" behavior.

Yet, in view of what is known bybiologists, the suggestion of the authorsthat "life, far from being outside thenatural order, appears as the supremeexpression of the self-organizing pro-cesses" is simply incorrect. Most scien-tists would agree with the critical viewexpressed in Problems of BiologicalPhysics (Springer-Verlag, 1981) by thebiophysicist L. A. Blumenfeld, when hewrote: "The meaningful macroscopicordering of biological structure doesnot arise due to the increase of certainparameters or a system above theircritical values. These structures arebuilt according to program-like compli-cated architectural structures, themeaningful information created duringmany billions of years of chemical andbiological evolution being used." Lifeis a consequence of microscopic, notmacroscopic, organization.

In the final part of the book, "FromBeing to Becoming," the authors takeon the giants—Boltzmann, Einstein,

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Planck and just about everyone elsewho holds the conventional idea of timein physics. They present their ownunusual idea that the origin of macro-scopic time irreversibility is a conse-quence of a previously unrecognizedtime irreversibility in the microscopiclaws of physics down "to all levels"—even to quantum levels—provided that"a minimum of complexity is main-tained." In short, they maintain thattime irreversibility is not derived froma time-reversible microworld, but isitself fundamental. The virtue of theiridea is that it resolves what theyperceive as a "clash of doctrines" aboutthe nature of time in physics.

Most physicists would agree thatthere is neither empirical evidence tosupport their view, nor is there amathematical necessity for it. There isno "clash of doctrines." Only Prigogineand a few collaborators hold to thesespeculations which, in spite of theirefforts, continue to live in the twilightzone of scientific credibility.

Great advances in mainstreamscience—the study of nonlinear dynam-ics; the understanding of critical phe-nomena by Kenneth Wilson, Leo Ka-danoff and Michael Fisher; the excitinglink between thermodynamics and thegeometrical properties of black holespioneered by Steven Hawking and Ja-kob Bekenstein—portend a deep unifi-cation of our understanding of nature.Unfortunately, little or none of thisappears in this book. The reader of thisintellectually stimulating book will geta rather distorted picture of what is oneof the most exciting areas of research inphysics.

Concepts in ParticlePhysics, Vol. IK. Gottfried and V. F. Weisskopf183 pp. Oxford U.P., New York, 1984.$22.50

Quarks and LeptonsF. Halzen and A. D. Martin379 pp. Wiley, New York, 1984.$29.95

The physics community's tradition ofbroad but rigorous undergraduatepreparation, coupled with the increas-ingly demanding mathematical andtechnical background required for pro-ductive research, places heavy burdensfor continual revisions on early-stagegraduate courses. Because progress inphysics occurs incrementally, withmore ideas and conceptual tools beingadded than discarded at each step, theproblems encountered in trying to in-corporate all this into courses alreadycrowded with essential material growmore and more vexing. Thus the publi-cation of a textbook based on the

struggle to accomplish this—especiallyin particle physics, where develop-ments have been rapid and profoundduring the last two decades—is sure tobe greeted by students and instructorsalike with a combination of relief,enthusiasm, and just a little doubt thatit will "work."

The two books reviewed here aresurveys of the "new physics" of parti-cles, and while the one by Gottfried andWeisskopf is not intended specificallyas a graduate text in the field, it still

deserves consideration as an introduc-tion for the sophisticated novice. Al-though both could be used profitably bya few undergraduates, these books willfind their largest audiences amongbudding particle physicists in the earlystages of graduate study, and amongworkers in other branches of physicswishing to acquaint themselves withthose developments of the last 20 yearsin particle theory and phenomenologythat are now firmly established.

In fact, in the first sentence of their

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