Prigogine Stengers order out of chaos. Prigogine and Stengers: Order out of chaos
Ilya Romanovich Prigogine (French Ilya Prigogine, January 25, 1917, Moscow, Russian empire- May 28, 2003 Austin, Texas) - Belgian physicist and physical chemist, one of the founders of non-equilibrium thermodynamics.
Born in Moscow, emigrated from Russia with his parents in 1920. In 1947 he proved that in a stationary state under constant external conditions, the production of entropy in a thermodynamic system is minimal (Prigozhin's theorem). Prigogine owns the first works on the statistical thermodynamics of irreversible processes and its application in chemistry and biology.
Nobel Prize (1977).
Books (10)
Introduction to thermodynamics of irreversible processes
A small monograph by the famous Belgian scientist I. Prigogine, Nobel Prize winner, is devoted to a very relevant and promising direction in modern science— thermodynamics of irreversible processes. The presented theory of irreversible processes is further development thermodynamics and is increasingly being used in various fields of physics, chemistry, biology and technology. At the end of the book is a Nobel lecture by I. Prigogine.
Distinguished by scientific rigor and generality of conclusions, with clarity and accessibility of presentation, the book is very useful for scientists and engineers, graduate students and students.
Time, chaos, quantum. To solve the paradox of time
The book by Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine and his co-author Isabella Stengers is devoted to a wide range of problems intensively studied under the guidance of I. Prigogine in International Institute physics and chemistry E. Solvay in Brussels and the Research Center for Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics in Austin (Texas).
These are the problems of time, randomness and chaos, indeterminism and irreversibility (“arrows of time”), self-organization and the emergence of dissipative structures. In addition, the book also discusses various aspects and prospects for a new paradigm of modern science, covering not only natural science, but also public and social disciplines. For a wide range of readers interested in the problems of modern science.
End of certainty. Time, Chaos and New Laws of Nature
At the turn of the century, questions of the future of science, especially physics and mathematics, are considered.
I.Prigozhin's approach is associated with the study of complex systems and its application to real world, knowledge of all levels of nature. The book opens a new dialogue between man and nature.
From existing to emerging
Time and complexity in the physical sciences.
The book is devoted to the analysis of the fundamental concepts of modern statistical physics: reversibility mechanical movement, instability of dynamical systems, irreversibility.
The second law of thermodynamics, formulated at the microscopic level, is taken as the main postulate - the law of the increase in entropy and thus the asymmetry of time. The transition from a dynamic time-reversible description to a probabilistic one is carried out by a special transformation that breaks time symmetry.
At the same time, a new concept is introduced - internal time, which characterizes processes in unstable dynamic systems. Numerous examples from physics, chemistry and biology demonstrate constructive role irreversible processes.
Knowledge of the complex. Introduction
The book provides a public overview of the methods developed in the field of nonlinear dynamics for studying complex systems and processes, such as evolution, self-organization, and so on.
Are given concrete examples from different fields of science - from chemistry, physics, biology to sociology and climatology.
Order out of chaos. A new dialogue between man and nature
The book of the famous Belgian physical chemist, Nobel Prize winner I.Prigozhin and his co-author I.Stengers is devoted to the consideration of science and philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries from the standpoint of science in the second half of the 20th century, as well as to the problems and features of modern scientific thinking.
The purpose of the book is to comprehend the path traversed by science and knowledge, and to set out the requirements of modern science and society to restore on new grounds the union of man with nature, in which there will be a unity not only of nature and man, but also of science, culture and society. The authors give a deep historical and philosophical consideration of scientific knowledge, starting with Newton and Laplace and ending with his later criticism by modern Western philosophers.
Self-organization in nonequilibrium systems
This book devoted to one of the main problems modern natural science- the emergence of order in open systems that are far from equilibrium. Periodic processes in chemically active media, prebiological evolution, various levels of regulation in biological systems are considered in detail. It can serve as an excellent illustration of the application of modern mathematical methods in chemistry and biology.
Modern thermodynamics
From heat engines to dissipative structures.
An educational publication that successively presents equilibrium, linear and non-linear non-equilibrium thermodynamics, the latter as general theory non-equilibrium processes.
The book is richly illustrated and contains historical information, exercises with solutions, and computer programs. Of particular interest is the fact that many of the fundamental concepts of nonequilibrium thermodynamics were created with the direct participation of one of the authors of the Nobel Prize winner I.R.Prigozhin. The subject of the book refers to the fundamental sections of natural science.
In a fundamental scientific publication written by world-famous scientists, the approach to chemical reaction as a thermodynamically irreversible process.
The presentation of the principles of classical thermodynamics, made masterfully simple and understandable, is extended to real systems. Theories of thermodynamic stability, moderation theorems, molecular theory of solutions, indifferent states are considered, which distinguishes this book from other in-depth guides. At present, the theory of irreversible phenomena is undergoing a period of rapid development. On the one hand, statistical mechanics, for a long time applied exclusively to the consideration of equilibrium states, was systematically extended to irreversible phenomena.
On the other hand, it turned out that the theory of irreversible processes can lead to new applications in the field of macroscopic physics. This is undoubtedly of exceptional interest in connection with the nonlinear problems that are so often encountered in hydrodynamics, when considering the processes of diffusion and heat transfer, etc.
The book of Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine and Isabella Stengers “Order out of chaos. A new dialogue between man and nature” is a notable phenomenon in modern scientific and philosophical literature. In terms of its genre, it is rather unusual, since the authors act in it as philosophers and historians of science. Narrating a new dialogue between man and nature, and at the same time not offering ready-made solutions, it encourages the reader to independently reflect on the problems raised in it.
The main theme of the book "Order out of chaos" is the rediscovery of the concept of time and the constructive role that irreversible processes play in natural phenomena. The revival of the problem of time in physics occurred after thermodynamics was extended to irreversible processes and a new formulation of dynamics was found, which makes it possible to clarify the meaning of irreversibility at the level of fundamental laws of physics.
Looking back, we clearly see that the concept of law, inherited from 17th century science, was formed as a result of the study of simple systems, more precisely, systems with periodic behavior, such as the movement of a pendulum or planets. The extraordinary advances in dynamics are due to the increasingly elegant and abstract formulation of the instruments of description centered on such systems. It is simple systems that are the special case in which the ideal of an exhaustive description becomes achievable. Knowledge of the law of evolution of simple systems makes it possible to have all the information about them, i.e., for any instantaneous state of the system, to unambiguously predict its future and restore the past. Then it was believed that the limited knowledge, the finite accuracy with which it is possible to describe systems, are of no fundamental importance. The ultimate transition from finite knowledge to an ideal description, implying infinite accuracy, was not difficult and could not lead to any surprises.
Now, when considering unstable dynamical systems, the problem of passage to the limit becomes crucial: only an infinitely accurate description, implying that all signs of the infinite decimal expansion of the numbers that specify the instantaneous state of the system, are known, could allow us to abandon the consideration of the system's behavior in terms of randomness and restore the ideal of a deterministic dynamic law.
In the history of Western thought, the dominant position is occupied by the conflict associated with the concept of time - the contradiction between the innovative time of the emancipation of man and the periodically recurring time of a stable material world, in which any change, any innovation necessarily turns out to be nothing more than an appearance. Oddly enough, but it was precisely this contradiction that caused a heated discussion between Leibniz and the spokesman for Newton's views, the English philosopher Clark. Correspondence between Leibniz and Clark makes it possible to present Newton's views in a new light: for Newton, nature was not just an automaton, but carried within itself an active productive principle. At the same time, the need to overcome the opposition of the “human”, historical sphere to the material world, which is accepted as atemporal, is described very well, which is affirmed by dialectical materialism. The emerging convergence of these two opposites will intensify as the means of describing the internally evolutionary Universe, of which we ourselves are an integral part, will be created. There is no doubt that the transformation of physical representations described in the book goes beyond the limits of the physical sciences and can contribute to the understanding of the historical reality that is the object of dialectical thought.
The significance of the book "Order out of chaos" lies in the fact that its authors not only find new arguments for criticizing the Newtonian model, but also show that the claims of Newtonianism to explain reality, which still have not lost force, although they have become much more moderate, - are compatible with the much broader modern picture of the world created by the efforts of subsequent generations of scientists. Prigogine and Stengers show that the so-called "universal laws" are by no means universal, but are applicable only to local areas of reality. It is in these areas that science has made its greatest efforts.
The essence of the arguments presented by Prigogine and Stengers could be summarized as follows. The authors of Order Out of Chaos show that in the machine age, mainstream science focuses on stability, order, uniformity, and balance. It studies mainly closed systems and linear relationships in which a small input signal causes a small output response uniformly over the entire domain of definition.
It is not surprising that in the transition from an industrial society with its characteristic huge expenditures of energy, capital and labor to a society with highly developed technology, for which information and technological innovations are critical resources, new scientific models of the world inevitably arise.
Prigogine's paradigm is especially interesting because it focuses on the aspects of reality that are most characteristic of the current stage of accelerated social change: disorder, instability, diversity, non-equilibrium, non-linear relationships in which a small input signal can cause an arbitrarily strong output response, and temporality - increased sensitivity to the passage of time.
To begin with, our previous ideas about the world are undergoing strong erosion - radical changes towards plurality, complexity and temporality. Determinism and mechanism have been replaced by modernist science, which takes into account quantum uncertainty, irreversibility and probability. Big Bang, the evolution of matter and the Universe, the development of life are vivid illustrations of the fact that natural processes associated with randomness or irreversibility and considered by determinists as unfortunate exceptions to the rules actually prevail and that irreversible processes and fluctuations are inherent in reality as such.
The changes in science in question occur at all levels: from the understanding of nature elementary particles to the cosmology of the Universe expanding with acceleration. They cover not only the natural sciences, but - social processes and human behavior.
In the preface to the English edition of the scientific bestseller "Order out of Chaos", I.Prigozhin and I.Stengers wrote that the conceptual re-equipment of physics is still far from being completed and that in the scientific heritage that we have inherited there are two fundamental questions that the old science could not find an answer to. . “One of them is the question of the relationship between chaos and order. The famous law of increasing entropy describes the world as constantly evolving from order to chaos. At the same time, as biological or social evolution shows, the complex arises from the simple. How can this be? How can structure emerge from chaos? We have now made some progress in answering this question. Now we know that disequilibrium - the flow of matter or energy - can be a source of order. But there is another, even more fundamental question. Classic or the quantum physics describes the world as reversible, static. In their description there is no place for evolution either to order or to chaos. The information extracted from dynamics remains constant in time. There is a clear contradiction between the static picture of dynamics and the evolutionary paradigm of thermodynamics. What is irreversibility? What is entropy? It is unlikely that there will be other questions that would be so often discussed in the course of the development of science. Only now are we beginning to reach that degree of understanding and that level of knowledge that allows us to answer these questions to one degree or another.”
As a natural nonconformist and modernist, Prigogine initially proceeded from a concept that was largely opposed to the deterministic doctrine of the simplicity of the universe. Chaos, complexity and multifactoriality lie at the beginning of the creation of the World, the development of which is an evolutionary process of self-organization of the so-called dissipative systems that never reach equilibrium, but continue to oscillate between numerous states. In other words, Prigogine was interested in the deep connections between order and disorder.
According to Prigogine's synergetics, all systems contain subsystems that constantly fluctuate. A single fluctuation, or a combination of fluctuations, can become so strong that the pre-existing organization breaks down and collapses. At such a bifurcation point, it is fundamentally impossible to predict in which direction further development will take place: whether the state of the system will become chaotic or whether it will move to a new, more differentiated and higher level of order or organization, which the authors call a dissipative structure.
In other words, in states that are far from equilibrium, very weak perturbations, or fluctuations, can be amplified to gigantic waves that destroy the existing structure, and this sheds light on all sorts of processes of evolutionary jumps.
Prigogine and his students developed just such a physics and were convinced that this would lead to a new paradigm for understanding nature. New physics, he said, could also bridge the huge gap between science, which had always described nature as the result of deterministic laws, and the humanities, which emphasized human freedom and responsibility. Mechanism is incompatible with humanity, unification is more metaphorical than literal - it will in no way help science solve all its problems.
In the preface to Prigozhin's book Order Out of Chaos, Alvin Toffler compared Prigozhin to Newton and predicted that the science of the third millennium would be largely Prigogine's.
Ilya Romanovich Prigozhin was born during the revolution, and his bourgeois family soon fled Russia - away from the Bolsheviks and pogroms. At first, the family emigrated to Lithuania, but a year later they moved to Berlin. With the growth of anti-Semitic sentiment in Germany, provoked by the Nazis, the Prigogines moved to Belgium, where in 1941 Ilya graduated from the University of Brussels.
Prigogine is positioned as an outstanding Belgian and American scientist, physicist, chemist, philosopher, creator of modern non-equilibrium thermodynamics and a new paradigm of the natural world evolving in time. He is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1977), the owner of many national and international titles, titles and regalia, the author of a number of scientific and philosophical bestsellers, original theories and concepts of the philosophy of science, and one of the founders of a new scientific direction- systems of understanding of the world, called synergetics. The fundamental problems dealt with by Ilya Prigogine cover a huge range of problems of the universe that do not have a clear disciplinary framework.
Ilya Romanovich grew up as a child prodigy, played the piano remarkably, wrote music and was considered a good composer, whose works were often heard on Belgian radio. Being a neophile, he studied literature, art, philosophy, was professionally interested in archeology and took up science early. Prigogine's science itself is largely archeological, that is, it includes jumps in evolution occurring at bifurcation points. It should be recalled here that among the many titles and regalia, Prigozhin had a doctorate in archeology, and it was in this capacity that he was often invited to lecture at the most prestigious universities in the world.
He himself called all this "turbulent youth", which became the reason for his fascination with time throughout his career: "Perhaps I was impressed by the fact that science says so little about time, history, evolution, and this may have led me to problem of thermodynamics. Because in thermodynamics the main measure is entropy, and entropy simply means change.”
In Belgium, Prigogine survived German occupation during the war and nearly died.
In the 1960s, Prigogine actively collaborated with the Fermi Institute in Chicago, and in 1967 he founded the Center for the Study of Complex Quantum Systems in Austin (Texas), which dealt with nonequilibrium thermodynamics and statistical mechanics of irreversible processes. His main achievement is considered to be the discovery of non-equilibrium thermodynamic systems, which, at singular points under certain conditions, absorbing matter, energy and information from the surrounding space, can make a qualitative leap to complication (the so-called dissipative structures). The most significant thing here was that the singular jump cannot be predicted from the classical laws of statistics.
Prigogine's detractors accused him of not so much experimenting as saturating them with philosophy, and that he received the Nobel Prize for much lesser achievements than other physicist laureates. In fact, Prigozhin experimented extensively and fruitfully, circling between the institutions he founded at the Free Belgian University and the University of Texas at Austin.
Prigozhin's employees said that it was extremely interesting to work with him: he always set extraordinary tasks and often suggested completely unexpected approaches to their solution. Prigogine had a lot to learn both in scientific and human aspects.
Prigozhin was on friendly terms with the King of Belgium and even received the title of viscount from him. He lived on the outskirts of Brussels and often the "cream of society" gathered in his house, including famous scientists and high-ranking officials of the European Commission. Everyone considered it an honor to get to such meetings, especially since his house seemed like a museum with a huge and carefully selected collection of works of art. For the most part, these were objects from the era of pre-Columbian America, as well as works of art. different countries and epochs, thematically one way or another connected with Time. Prigozhin liked to talk about the collection he had assembled as a fascinating intellectual journey through time and intercultural spaces, and a journey arranged with the highest professionalism.
ORDER AND DISORDER, MAN AND NATURE
Prigogine believed neither in tabula rasa nor in the doctrine of simplicity, considering uncertainty, unpredictability and irreversibility to be the constituent elements of the universe. He considered the great determinists Descartes, Newton, Einstein to be utopians, leading science into the mountainous world of eternal beauty.
According to Laplacian determinism, any state of the Universe is a consequence of the previous ones and the cause of its subsequent states, that is, it is rigidly predetermined. The principle of determinism (just once and for all a well-oiled clockwork) well illustrates Laplace's textbook saying that a being capable of covering the entire set of data on the state of the Universe at any moment in time could not only accurately predict the future, but also restore the past to the smallest detail. .
If determinism arose as a result of the study of simple, closed or mechanical systems, supposedly subject to a universal and exhaustive description, then synergetics initially proceeded from the need to consider unstable dynamic or evolving systems that go far beyond the natural sciences, in which, in contrast to the opinion of Albert Einstein, “God plays dice”, that is, there are unpredictable singularities and accidents that radically change the course of processes.
A deterministic world is as much a utopia as the dreams of Thomas More, Fourier, Saint-Simon or Owen, debunked by Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and Milan Kundera, and, most importantly, by the practice of Bolshevism.
Prigogine did not reject the previous "universal laws", but showed their limitations - applicability only to local and isolated areas of reality that do not exchange energy or matter (one might add - and information) with the environment.
In 1986, Sir James Lighthill, who later became President of the International Union of Pure and Applied Mathematics, under the influence of Prigogine's works, apologized on behalf of all scientists for the fact that "for three centuries the educated public was misled by an apology for determinism based on the system of Newton and Laplace , while it can be considered proven, at least since 1960, that determinism is an erroneous position.
In the scientific bestseller Order Out of Chaos (co-authored with Isabelle Stengers), Prigogine pointed out that modernist theories do not describe nature "from the outside", as if by a spectator, but try to understand it from within itself. In a sense, they are "opaque" compared to the transparency of classical thought.
Along with the ingenious creators of quantum mechanics, Prigogine became the destroyer of the paradigm of determinism, but now in application not only to quantum, but also to classical objects. Having fallen into the lens of big science, the problem of instability and instability not only demonstrated the limitations of the causal predetermination of physical phenomena, but made it possible to include complex processes in the field of view of natural science and even human activity thus giving the opportunity to more fully integrate man into nature and connect consciousness with being. The phenomena of instability, unpredictability, uncertainty in many ways made it possible to overcome the disunity that has always existed between natural science, social studies and the sciences of man and consciousness.
The questions that Prigogine asked included the following: how the thermodynamic law of the growth of entropy (chaos) is combined with the self-organization and evolution of matter. The world vividly illustrates that order and disorder arise and exist simultaneously. Moreover, they turn out to be closely related - one includes the other.
Cosmology views the universe as a largely disordered environment in which order crystallizes. Great amount elementary particles that are in disorder, is able to move to an ordered structure under the influence of a single particle, that is, order and disorder coexist as two aspects of reality and give us a different vision of the world.
In a deterministic world, nature lends itself to unambiguous description and complete control by man, representing an inert object of his desires. Prigogine’s world is characterized by instability and uncertainty, and if so, then a person is obliged not to “conquer nature”, but to treat it carefully and delicately, if only because of the inability to unambiguously predict and foresee the consequences of one’s own activity and what will happen in the future.
What has been said fully applies not only to nature or science, but to art, music, literature; society has learned to accept the diversity of styles and views of the world. The world is ruled not by order, but by chance, instability, non-linear dynamics. Everything, including science and society, is in a state of constant change. In particular, the revolutions themselves can be seen as vivid illustrations of how a hierarchy of instabilities gives rise to structural changes in society.
Society's faith in rationalization and unification is declining in all areas of life, from science to religion: “Even zealous Catholics are no longer as fanatical as their parents and grandparents were. We no longer believe in Marxism or liberalism in the classical sense. We no longer believe in classical science."
So the self-confident and omniscient science of Descartes and Leibniz, conditioned by the mechanistic context of the 17th century. - materialism, rationalism, reductionism and determinism - began to be crowded by modernist science, which includes Prigogine's bifurcations, quantum uncertainty and unique events. The utopian world as an absolutely well-oiled automaton lying outside of time has been replaced by a new paradigm of reality, embracing human realities and human consciousness itself.
If before Prigogine philosophy was torn between mutually exclusive images of objectivity and subjectivity - a deterministic external world and an indeterministic internal one - then from now on consciousness-being has become a unity that falls out of materialism, rationalism, reductionism and determinism.
Science itself, in contrast to faith, has found support not in givenness and unambiguity, but in probability and uncertainty. This is precisely the diversity and the “new charm of nature”.
Prigogine was always interested in the problem of instability or instability, which for a long time remained in the stepdaughters of science. It is the phenomenon of instability, which has been left out of science, as it turned out, leads to non-trivial and serious problems, the first of which is the need to predict the behavior of an object at bifurcation or singularity points. On simple mechanical models, such as the swing of a pendulum, it can be seen that there are situations where the behavior of the pendulum is unpredictable, that is, even an elementary and well-studied mechanical object behaves in a non-deterministic way. The more complex the system, the less it obeys the elementary "laws of nature".
Bifurcation points in the theory of non-equilibrium processes of dynamic chaos are acts of spontaneous, outwardly not determined by anything, and therefore unpredictable separation of an initially homogeneous material, process or course of events. Such an act can give rise to many fragmentations, branching, evolution as such.
We know from mathematics that in a nonequilibrium situation differential equations, modeling one or another natural process, become non-linear, and a non-linear equation usually has more than one type of solution. In nature, this corresponds to the fact that at any unpredictable moment of time a new type of solution can arise that is not reducible to the previous one, and at points of singularity or change of types of solutions - at bifurcation points - a change in the spatiotemporal organization of the object can occur.
As shining example the emergence of a new space-time structure can serve as a "chemical clock" - a chemical process during which the solution periodically changes its color. It looks like molecules in different regions of the solution can communicate with each other in some way. In fact, in a nonequilibrium system, the coherence of the behavior of molecules increases sharply. In equilibrium, the molecule "sees" only its immediate neighbors and interacts ("communicates") only with them. Far from equilibrium, each part of the system "sees" the whole system. It can be said that in equilibrium the matter is blind, but out of equilibrium, as it were, it “sees clearly”. That is why in a non-equilibrium system, unique events and fluctuations are possible that contribute to these events. We can talk about expanding the scope of the system and increasing its sensitivity to the outside world. This underlies evolution and leads to the emergence of a historical perspective, that is, the possibility of the emergence of more advanced forms of organization of matter and consciousness.
PHILOSOPHY
With the advent of synergetics, the non-alternative progressive process of evolution was replaced by an idea consonant with the "creative evolution" of Anri Bergson - a philosophy that allows one to move from simple forms of organization of matter to complex ones and from development along a single trajectory to evolution along divergent lines.
An integral advantage of Prigogine's philosophical system is a plural and three-dimensional vision of the world. Man is not only a witness, but also a creator of the epoch. The choice between deterministic subordination and certainty, where the highest virtue is obedience to circumstances, and the activity of a free person - this choice is always existential and even tragic, because freedom is associated with the acceptance of risk and responsibility.
Modernist physics - quantum theory, synergetics, modern cosmology - lead us to the conclusion that reality is beyond human control due to the existence of instability, uncertainty, unpredictability and stochasticity of many phenomena, and this applies not only to social phenomena or psychology, but to the so-called "objective" world . Contrary to classical physics, we cannot fully control the world of unstable phenomena surrounding us or the trajectory of material processes due to the presence of bifurcation points on these trajectories, in which the course of the process is unpredictable.
According to the views of Ilya Prigogine, the trajectories of many systems are unstable, which means that we can make reliable predictions only for short time intervals between bifurcation points. The brevity of these intervals (also called the temporal horizon or the Lyapunov exponent) means that after certain period time, the trajectory inevitably eludes us, that is, we lose information about it. Knowledge opens windows to the universe for us, but due to the essential instability of many processes, absolute or exhaustive knowledge is impossible (or is of a probabilistic nature).
All utopias are stillborn, because they do not include stochasticity, uncertainty and probability - this applies equally to the physical and social worlds, to science and culture, where any given topic always allows for a great many continuations. This puts an end to claims of absolute control over any realm of reality, much less any utopian dreams of an absolutely controlled society. Reality is generally uncontrollable in the sense that was proclaimed by the old deterministic science.
Prigogine took a fresh look at the relationship between chance and necessity - relationships, for a long time former subject fierce intellectual wars. Philosophers and theologians have been concerned for centuries with the problem of reconciling determinism with free will. One of the cunning solutions to this problem consisted in recognizing the determinism of everything that happens in the world - divine predestination, with a reservation regarding the free will of the individual. God determines and controls everything, but gives a person a certain freedom of choice, within which he is free to make decisions at his own discretion. Werner Heisenberg and the creators of quantum mechanics shook the idea of the certainty and necessity of everything that exists, and the existentialist philosophers approved the idea of the absoluteness of human freedom. Thus, already before Prigogine, the problem of determinism had undergone significant changes: “The erasing all differences, the depersonalizing approach of the old determinism was replaced in every possible way by an evolutionary approach based on the use of determinations, emphasizing differences” (Edgar Morin).
The synergetic approach to this problem recognized necessity and chance (determinism and freedom) as complementary: a nonequilibrium system follows the “laws of nature” for some time, but under the influence of fluctuations at some point reaches a bifurcation point, at which it is fundamentally impossible to predict in which state the system will pass. Randomness pushes what remains of the system onto a new path of development, and after the path (one of many possible) is chosen, determinism again comes into force - and so on until the next bifurcation point. In other words, chance and necessity act not as incompatible opposites, but as mutually complementary elements of evolution.
Modernist science is essentially narrative. If before there was a dichotomy - predominantly narrative (narrative) Social sciencies and natural (exact) sciences, focused on the search for the laws of nature or calculated trajectories of processes, then synergetics destroyed such a dichotomy. Reality includes unique processes - whether it is the appearance or destruction of the universe, the birth of life, the appearance and disappearance of species - as well as the existence of unpredictable singularities on evolutionary trajectories. We are increasingly moving away from the center of the world: the discoveries of Galileo showed that the earth is not the center planetary system, Darwin showed that man is only an element in the evolution of life, and Freud and Jung discovered that even our own consciousness is only a part of the unconscious that surrounds it or the collective. When applied to culture or humanity, this also means that there is not and cannot be higher and lower races, chosen peoples, or a single (correct) view of the world.
We must treat the concepts of risk and responsibility in a completely different way. In a deterministic world, there is no risk, because it is incompatible with rationality and single-variance. Risk appears only where the universe opens up as something multivariate, similar to the sphere of human existence. In modernist science, the place of the universe is occupied by a multiverse, a multi-world and a multi-variant vision of the world, opening up endless possibilities for nature and man to choose - by the way, for a person - a choice that means a certain ethical responsibility.
When the state tries to suppress evolution and change by brutal force, Prigogine said, it destroys the meaning of life, it creates a society of "timeless robots." On the other hand, a completely irrational, unpredictable world would also be terrifying. Therefore, it is necessary to find something in between - a probabilistic description, or a probabilistic style of thinking inherent in modernist scientific knowledge. After all, human behavior, Prigogine always emphasized, cannot be determined by any scientific, mathematical model: “In human life, we do not have any simple basic equations! When you decide whether to drink coffee or not, this is already a difficult decision. It depends on what day it is, whether you like coffee and so on.
According to Prigogine, history, as a set of bifurcations, is extremely sensitive to individual efforts. Those bifurcations that lead to new historical systems are initiated by geniuses-forerunners, capable of influencing the socio-cultural environment and existing social mechanisms. Mankind needs to overcome the incompatibility of free creative activity Man and political power. Prigogine not only considered the role of the individual more important than the state, but put forward the thesis: individual human life- a key factor in the evolution of mankind.
We see that synergetics, in which the place of stability, order, homogeneity and equilibrium is occupied by instability, nonlinearity, chaos, disorder and disequilibrium, is not just a theory of self-organization of matter that has replaced thermodynamics, but - new system understanding of the world, taking into account the non-linearity and non-equilibrium of the processes of formation of "order through chaos", as well as unpredictable bifurcation changes, the irreversibility of time, instability as a fundamental characteristic of evolutionary processes. The problematic field of synergetics, according to Prigogine, is centered around the concept of "complexity", focusing on understanding the nature, principles of organization and evolution of the world.
Researchers draw attention to the general cultural connotations of Prigogine's synergetics, perhaps for the first time in the history of science, which has thrown bridges between the natural sciences and the humanities. It's about about the deep social and even political overtones that are clearly heard in the book “Order from Chaos”. Just as Newtonian celestial mechanics gave rise to analogies in sociology and politics, Prigogine's synergetics allows for far-reaching parallels.
For example, in "Order out of chaos" much attention is paid to the theory of organization and an original interpretation of some psychological processes, For example innovation activities, in which the authors see a connection with the "non-average" behavior (nonaverage) of outstanding personalities, similar to that arising in non-equilibrium conditions.
Important consequences of synergetics also arise in the interpretation of collective behavior. social relations determined not so much by genetic or sociobiological explanations not, but - social interactions in non-equilibrium conditions.
It is not surprising that modern economists, ethnographers, geographers, ecologists and representatives of many others scientific specialties apply the ideas of synergetics in their research.
Life itself is possible only in open systems that exchange matter, energy and information with the outside world.
Prikhozhin's understanding of time largely coincides with the poetic formula of Paul Valery: "Time is a construction." Time is not something ready-made, appearing in completed forms before a hypothetical superhuman mind. No and no! Time is constructed at every given moment, giving rise to unpredictable leaps and singularities, and in human culture - giving humanity the opportunity to take part in the process of such "construction".
I would like to emphasize that a radical revision of the concept of time is an essential component grandiose revolution taking place in modern science and culture.
Inclusion in the consideration of time allowed Prigogine to understand not only non-equilibrium structures that arise as a result of irreversible processes, but to consider dynamic, unstable systems that completely change our understanding of determinism.
Prigogine said that even in his student years he was struck by glaring contradictions in the natural-scientific approach to the problem of time, and that these contradictions became the starting point for all his future activities.
Like Augustine Aurelius, obsession Prigogine became the nature of time. The very word "Time" he wrote with capital letter, since the vector of time or time as irreversibility and becoming emerging from the existing was the main topic of his scientific interests.
In his numerous interviews, he complained that physics underestimated the obvious fact that time only moves forward in one direction. Required physical theory, which is based on the irreversibility of the period of reality. Such a theory, Prigogine believed, would become a bridge over the abyss separating the exact sciences and the humanities, and thereby demonstrate the "new charm" of nature.
Actually main topic The book "Order out of chaos" is a rediscovery of the concept of time and the constructive role that irreversible processes play in natural phenomena. The authors have found a new formulation of dynamics, which makes it possible to clarify the meaning of irreversibility at the level of fundamental laws of physics.
Prigogine realized early on that the time vector is the most important element in the structure of the universe: "This brought me in a sense into conflict with great physicists like Einstein, who said that time is an illusion." In fact, the irreversibility of time is not an illusion, but the essence and meaning of evolution, which makes us all not fathers, but children of time: “We appeared as a result of evolution. What we need to do is include evolutionary models in our descriptions. What we need is a Darwinian view of physics, an evolutionary view of physics, a biological view of physics.”
According to Prigogine, evolution itself is essentially "unstable", that is, it is controlled by mechanisms that allow unpredictable jumps, which are capable of making previous events the starting point of a new development, a new global interdependent order.
Evolution is the emergence of new levels of organization and a series of transitions to a new type of homeostasis (relative dynamic constancy of the composition and properties of the internal environment). New levels of organization arise at bifurcation points, at each of which a “fan” of potentially possible directions for the development of the system appears.
Open systems exchanging with external environment matter, energy, and, most importantly, information, are characterized by a hierarchy of level organization of elements. As they develop, new levels and a new differentiation of the system into subsystems appear. At the same time, each new level has a reverse effect on the levels that were formed earlier, modifies them, and this is how the system functions as a new whole.
Contrary to the thermodynamic principle of entropy, the evolution of the Universe, matter or life does not at all lead to a decrease in the level of organization and impoverishment of the variety of forms. On the contrary, they develop in the opposite direction: from the simple to the complex, from lower forms of life to higher ones, from undifferentiated to differentiated structures. Over time the level internal organization The universe is steadily rising.
Concentrating on the directed arrow of time, Prigogine asks: “What is the specific structure of dynamic systems that allows them to “distinguish the past from the future”? What is the minimum level of complexity necessary for such a distinction?
The answer given by Prigogine can be reduced to the following: the arrow of time manifests itself only in combination with chance. Only in the case when the system behaves in a sufficiently random way, in its development and description, there is a difference between the past and the future and, consequently, irreversibility. It is the irreversible processes of the emergence of order from chaos that give rise to high levels of organization (for example, dissipative structures).
Interpreting the second law of thermodynamics in this light, Prigogine considered entropy not as a movement towards chaos, but as the progenitor of order in open systems.
If reversibility is inherent in closed systems, then irreversibility is inherent in the entire Universe, where, under non-equilibrium conditions, entropy can produce not degradation, but order, organization, and, ultimately, life.
Prigogine's ideas about entropy as a source of organization mean that entropy is losing the character of a rigid alternative that arises in front of systems in the process of evolution: while some systems degenerate, others develop in an ascending line and reach more high level organizations. This unifying rather than mutually exclusive approach allows biology and physics to coexist instead of being in a relationship of contradictory opposition.
ORDER OUT OF CHAOS
Man's new dialogue with nature
Heinemann. London. 1984
Ilya Prigogine, Isabella Stengers
ORDER FROM CHAOS
A new dialogue between man and nature
Translation from English Yu. A. Danilova
General edition and afterword
V. I. Arshinov, Yu. L. Klimontovich
And Yu. V. Sachkova
BBC 15.56 Editor O. N. Cassidy
P 75 Prigozhin I., Stengers I.
Order out of chaos: A new dialogue between man and nature: Per. from English / Common. ed. V. I. Arshinov, Yu. L. Klimontovich and Yu. V. Sachkov. - M.: Progress, 1986.-432 p.
The book of the famous Belgian physical chemist, Nobel Prize winner I. Prigozhin and his co-author I. Stengers is devoted to the consideration of science and philosophy of the 19th and 20th centuries. from the standpoint of science in the second half of our century, as well as the problems and features of modern scientific thinking. The purpose of the book is to comprehend the path traversed by science and knowledge, and set out the requirements of modern science and society: to restore the union of man with nature on new grounds, in which there will be not only the unity of nature and man, but also science, culture and society. The authors give a broad and deep historical-scientific and philosophical consideration of scientific knowledge, beginning with Newton and Laplace and ending with his later criticism by contemporary bourgeois philosophers.
Editorial Board of Literature in Philosophy and Linguistics
© I. Prigogine, I. Stengers, 1984
© Foreword - O. Toffler, 1984
© Translation into Russian and afterword - publishing house "Progress", 1986
From the publisher
The book of Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine and Isabella Stengers “Order out of chaos. A new dialogue between man and nature” is a notable phenomenon in modern scientific and philosophical literature. In terms of its genre, it is rather unusual, since the authors act in it as philosophers and historians of science. Narrating a new dialogue between man and nature and at the same time not offering ready-made solutions, it encourages the reader to independently reflect on the problems raised in it.
The consistent evolution of the views of the authors is reflected in numerous editions of the book in various languages, starting with the publication in 1979 of the first (French) version called “The New Alliance. Metamorphoses of Science". The Russian translation was made from the English edition of the book, selected by I. Prigogine at the request of the publisher as the most complete and up-to-date. The dialogue with the authors, begun in the English edition by the preface of O. Toffler, is continued in the Russian edition by V. I. Arshinov, Yu. L. Klimontovich and Yu. V. Sachkov.
The name of Ilya Prigozhin is well known to Soviet readers. His main works have been translated into Russian: Prigogine I. Introduction to the thermodynamics of irreversible processes. M., 1964; Prigogine I. Nonequilibrium Statistical Mechanics. M., 1964; Prigogine I., Defay R. Chemical thermodynamics. Novosibirsk, 1966; Glensdorf P., Prigogine I. Thermodynamic theory of structure, stability and fluctuations. M., 1973; Nicolis G., Prigogine I.
Self-organization in nonequilibrium systems. M., 1979. Fragments from Prigozhin's books were published in the journals "Chemistry and Life", "Nature".
I. Prigozhin heads large group physicists at the University of Brussels. He is director of the Solvay Institute and the Center for Thermodynamics and Statistical Physics at the University of Texas. In 1977, I. Prigogine was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in the field of chemical thermodynamics. Since 1982, Prigogine has been a foreign member of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
Isabella Stengers, a former member of Prigozhin's group at the University of Brussels, now lives and works in Paris.
In the preface to the Russian edition of his book “From the Existing to the Emerging” (Moscow, 1985), I. Prigogine expressed the hope that the publication of his book would contribute to the expansion of fruitful exchange in a field that is equally close to both practical applications and fundamental principles of modern science. Everyone who worked on this edition of the new book by Prigozhin and Stengers also hopes that it will serve this lofty goal.