15 Quotes by Ilya Prigogine

Now we see evolutionary trends in a variety of areas ranging from atomic and molecular physics through fluid mechanics, chemistry and biology to large scale systems of relevance in environmental and economic sciences.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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.