Quotes from Ilya Prigogine

The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero.

The idea of spontaneous generation of life in its present form is therefore highly improbable even to the scale of the billions of years during which prebotic evolution occurred.

We grow in direct proportion to the amount of chaos we can sustain and dissipate

Entropy is the price of structure.

The main character of any living system is openness.

Order arise from chaos.

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.

The irreversibility of time is the mechanism that brings order out of chaos.

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.

one measure of a book is the degree to which it generates good questions,

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

Only when a system behaves in a sufficiently random way may the difference between past and future, and therefore irreversibility, enter its description.

on the conviction that nature responds to experimental interrogation.

there is a tendency to forget that all science is bound up with human culture in general, and that scientific findings, even those which at the moment appear the most advanced and esoteric and difficult to grasp, are meaningless outside their cultural context.

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.

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.

The great characteristic of the mathematical mind is its capacity for dealing with abstractions; and for eliciting from them clear-cut demonstrative trains of reasoning, entirely satisfactory so long as it is those abstractions which you want to think about.

Prigogine and Stengers caution against leaping to genetic or sociobiological explanations for puzzling social behavior. Many things that are attributed to biological pre-wiring are not produced by selfish, determinist genes, but rather by social interactions under nonequilibrium conditions.

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?

Be that as it may, from Plato and Aristotle onward, the limits were set, and thought was channeled in socially acceptable directions. In particular, the distinction between theoretical thinking and technological activity was established. The words we still use today—machine, mechanical, engineer—have a similar meaning. They do not refer to rational knowledge but to cunning and expediency.