A way to new rationality (On the Centenary of the Birth of I.R. Prigogine, A Foreign Member of the USSR/Russian Academy of Sciences)

Resumo

We are in the habit of living in a deterministic world, in which knowledge of the state of the system at a point in time allows us to describe the future unambiguously. Ilya Prigogine and his students were able to shake this idea, which had been formulated long ago by Isaac Newton. They were able to show that everything is much more complicated, that instability generates ambiguity, and that the future state of a system can at best be described only probabilistically.