Beyond Being and Becoming |
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| Authors: | ILYA PRIGOGINE |
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| Affiliation: | Awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize for his work on the thermodynamics of nonequilibrium systems, the late ILYA PRIGOGINE, who died in 2003, was a theoretical physicist and intellectual progenitor of concepts that have become popularly known as “self‐organization” and “order out of chaos.” He was the director of the Solvay Institute at Free University in Brussels, as well as director of the Center for Statistical Mechanics and Complex Systems at the University of Texas. |
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| Abstract: | If the 20th Century was the century of physics, the 21st Century is the century of cybernetics, biology and ecology. Technological advance has both crossed new frontiers and discovered old limits. Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine broke new ground with his understanding that nature, including its human component, seeks to establish order out of chaos by “self‐organizing,” not only according to pre‐determined laws, but through random creative choices as well that are responsible for the endless novelty and potentiality of being. The technologically‐armed purposive role of humans in the Anthropocentric Age thus takes on a new significance: “What we do today depends on our image of the future rather than the future depending on what we do today” as Prigogine puts it. “The equations of the future are written in our actions as well as in nature. Time becomes construction.” Nowhere is this truer than in the new science of genomics, which touches the soul, and in the effort to preserve the ecological balance that has enabled humanity to flourish within the narrow band of earth's livable climate. In this section we bring together leading thinkers, scientists and technologists of our age to address these issues of mankind's fate. |
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