Quotes from Ilya Prigogine

One of the key controversies surrounding this concept has to do with Prigogine's insistence that order and organization can actually arise "spontaneously" out of disorder and chaos through a process of "self-organization." To grasp this extremely powerful idea, we first need to make a distinction between systems that are in "equilibrium," systems that are "near equilibrium," and systems that are "far from equilibrium.

This property of reversibility in dynamics leads, however, to a difficulty whose full significance was realized only with the introduction of quantum mechanics. Manipulation and measurement are essentially irreversible. Active science is thus, by definition, extraneous to the idealized, reversible world it is describing.

Needham comments that, according to a philosophic conception dominant in China, the cosmos is in spontaneous harmony and the regularity of phenomena is not due to any external authority. On the contrary, this harmony in nature, society, and the heavens originates from the equilibrium among these processes. Stable and interdependent, they resonate with each other in a kind of nonconcerted harmony.

The future is uncertain... but this uncertainty is at the very heart of human creativity.