Work · Science & Human Sciences
Order out of Chaos
Written with the chemist Ilya Prigogine: the physics of irreversible processes and of self-organisation far from equilibrium overturns the classical image of a timeless, deterministic nature and calls for a new alliance between the sciences and culture.
Introduction
Prigogine and Stengers published “La Nouvelle Alliance” in Paris in 1979; a German version, “Dialog mit der Natur”, followed in 1980, and the English version “Order out of Chaos” in 1984 with a foreword by Alvin Toffler. The book traces the history of classical physics and its image of a timeless, reversible, deterministic nature, which had separated science from human experience. Against this it sets the thermodynamics of irreversible processes and the study of self-organisation in systems far from equilibrium, for which Prigogine had received the Nobel Prize in 1977, and argues that time, history and novelty belong to nature. The book was translated into many languages and was a widely read work of the philosophy of science of its decade.
More works by Isabelle Stengers
- 1997Cosmopolitics
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