NOBEL prizewinning chemist Ilya Prigogine wants to overthrow Newton, declaring that the laws of physics as formulated in the traditional way describe an idealised, stable world that is quite different from the unstable, evolving one that we actually observe.
His book tackles the "arrow of time"those processes in nature that are irreversible, such as the second law of thermodynamics. This states that physical systems with many degrees of freedom will move towards states with increased disorder; by observing the process, you can identify the direction of time.
Consider a jar holding a gas of atoms. Suppose that initially all the atoms are at the left hand side of the jar. After a while, the atoms will be equally distributed throughout in the jar. The disorder, or entropy, has increased. On the other hand, if in the initial ...
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