Status
Available
Publication
Bollati Boringhieri (2014), Perfect Paperback
Description
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.
User reviews
LibraryThing member Steve55
At the heart of this book is a challenge to the bedrock of our current scientific thinking. Newton's science, and indeed that of quantum physics contains no arrow of time. Whilst it may be true that knowing the current movement of balls on a pool table not only reveals where they will go, but also
As Prigigone points out, all of our time reversible equations describe a simplification of what actually occurs in nature. We live our lives with eyes blinkered, dismissing reality as the exception to our neatly formed approximations.
Nobel laureate Prigigone does his best to avoid the mathematics as he describes ground breaking ideas that challenge and redefine science and through it the way we comprehend our world. In doing so it shakes the foundations of our knowledge and points not just to new understanding but new ways of understanding a universe governed by probabilities.
In my case at least, Prigigone did not fully succeed and there are parts of the book in which my lack of mathematical knowledge left me floundering. However don't be put off and feel free to skip the middle chapters. The key ideas all shine through even without the maths and will feed the open mind of those seeking a real understanding of the natural world.
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where they have come from, in contrast all around us we see a world that is deeply time irreversible. Smoke and embers do not spontaneously form into pieces of wood and fragments of glass do not leap onto tables to form the shape of a vase. As Prigigone points out, all of our time reversible equations describe a simplification of what actually occurs in nature. We live our lives with eyes blinkered, dismissing reality as the exception to our neatly formed approximations.
Nobel laureate Prigigone does his best to avoid the mathematics as he describes ground breaking ideas that challenge and redefine science and through it the way we comprehend our world. In doing so it shakes the foundations of our knowledge and points not just to new understanding but new ways of understanding a universe governed by probabilities.
In my case at least, Prigigone did not fully succeed and there are parts of the book in which my lack of mathematical knowledge left me floundering. However don't be put off and feel free to skip the middle chapters. The key ideas all shine through even without the maths and will feed the open mind of those seeking a real understanding of the natural world.
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LibraryThing member JorgeCarvajal
Contrary to what the book description says, this text is not entirely suited for the general reader. A good half of the book is incomprehensible for a layman. Still, very big, world-changing ideas lie within, including those that challenge wide accepted views such as determinism, the Big Bang, and
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fundamental blocks of quantum mechanics and relativity. Alas, understanding the proof given by Prigogine to these claims is directly proportional to your expertise with mathematics. Show Less
Language
Original publication date
1996
Physical description
189 p.; 7.4 inches
ISBN
8833925641 / 9788833925646
Local notes
Dopo aver imparato che le certezze della fisica newtoniana sono illusorie e dipendono da semplificazioni artificiose della realtà, l'universo non ci appare più come un meccanismo perfetto e il mondo si è rivelato per quello che è: fluttuante, rumoroso e caotico. Ilya Prigogine è stato il primo a formulare una nuova scienza che propone di affrontare lo studio del mondo reale in tutta la sua complessità, oltre la meccanica classica e quantistica: una nuova scienza che si fonda su concetti nuovi come quelli di strutture dissipative, di instabilità dei sistemi dinamici, di sensibilità alle condizioni iniziali, di distribuzioni di probabilità, nel tentativo di restituire al tempo tutta la sua sostanza. Quella che Prigogine ci indica in questo libro è una stretta via tra un mondo deterministico governato da leggi ferree e un mondo assurdo in preda all'arbitrio del caso: le leggi della fisica assumono un senso nuovo, esprimendo ormai solo delle probabilità.
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