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From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences
Book by Prigogine, Ilya
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
About the author
Ilya Prigogine
163 books101 followersIlya, Viscount Prigogine (Russian: Илья́ Рома́нович Приго́жин, Ilya Romanovich Prigozhin) was a Russian-born naturalized Belgian physical chemist and Nobel Laureate noted for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 29, 2012
This 1980 book by a Nobel prize winner in chemistry (non-reversible thermodynamic systems) is today best seen as another step towards chaos theory although that word is not mentioned in this book (the first symposium on "chaos was held in 1977 in New York). He brings up many of the problems of deterministic systems and offers directions to potential general solutions. His main aim is to make readers aware that the development of higher level structures is dependent on irreversible chaotic processes.
August 19, 2018
“for the general reader with some background in physical chemistry and thermodynamics”. Well, to be honest it takes a little bit more than a general reader to fully understand this book. Yet, if you have the required skills to get the whole picture, it is one of the most fascinating book you will ever read! Yeah, it is old and you will soon notice, if you are an updated and avid reader/scientist/amateur fan of science. But do science get really old, when it is proven right? I mean... Newton's law of universal gravitation is old?
September 6, 2016
very difficult to understand, despite cover claim “for the general reader with some background in physical chemistry and thermodynamics”; mainly because of advanced math and poor development
December 26, 2015
An argument that time is an operator at the quantum level, which is an extremely different approach to the standard quantum theory.
June 5, 2019
This seems like Ilya Prigogine's post-Nobel victory lap book. It claims to be written for a general audience, but, no, it's not. Prigogine is challenging the very way physicists and physical chemists do calculations, and that's not going to be accessible to a general audience. This book lays out his case in one place for chemists and physicists, and it's probably not enough to convince skeptics, but it worked for me to see a bird's eye view of his argument from outside the field. I'd say it requires at least a BS in Chemistry or Physics to read this book and recommend his other books for people who actually want to read an argument rather than deduce it from equations and figures.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews