SCIENCE AND CHANGE
One of the most highly developed skills in contemporary Western civilization is dissection: the split-up of problems into their smallest possible components. We are good at it. So good, we often forget to put the pieces back together again.
Order Out of Chaos is a lever for changing science itself, for compelling us to reexamine its goals, its methods, its epistemology&msdash;its world view.
Some scholars picture science as driven by its own internal logic, developing according to its own laws in splendid isolation from the world around it. Yet many scientific hypotheses, theories, metaphors, and models (not to mention the choices made by scientists either to study or to ignore various problems) are shaped by economic, cultural, and political forces operating outside the laboratory.
Science is an open system embedded in society and linked to it by very dense feedback loops. It is powerfully influenced by its external environment, and, in a general way, its development is shaped by cultural receptivity to its dominant ideas.
Take that body of ideas that came together in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries under the heading of "classical science" or "Newtonianism." They pictured a world in which every event was determined by initial conditions that were, at least in principle, determinable with precision. It was a world in which chance played no part, in which all the pieces came together like cogs in a cosmic machine.
The acceptance of this mechanistic view coincided with the rise of a factory civilization. And divine dice-shooting seems hardly enough to account for the fact that the Age of the Machine enthusiastically embraced scientific theories that pictured the entire universe as a machine.
This view of the world led Laplace to claim that, given enough facts, we could not merely predict the future but retrodict the past. And this image of a simple, uniform; mechanical universe not only shaped the development of science, it also spilled over into many other fields. It influenced the framers of the American Constitution to create a machine for governing, its checks and balances clicking like parts of a clock. Metternich, when he rode forth to create his balance of power in Europe, carried a copy of Laplace's writings in his baggage. And the dramatic spread of factory civilization, with its vast clanking machines, its heroic engineering breakthroughs, the rise of the railroad, and new industries such as steel, textile, and auto, seemed merely to confirm the image of the universe as an engineer's Tinkertoy.
Today, however, the Age of the Machine is screeching to a halt. And the decline of the industrial age forces us to confront the painful limitations of the machine model of reality.
The notion that the world is a clockwork, the planets timelessly orbiting, all systems operating deterministically in equilibrium, all subject to universal laws that an outside observer could discover—this model has come under withering fire ever since it first arose.
In the early nineteenth century, thermodynamics challenged the timelessness implied in the mechanistic image of the universe . If the world was a big machine, the thermodynamicists declared, it was running down, its useful energy leaking out. It could not go on forever, and time, therefore, took on a new meaning. Darwin's followers soon introduced a contradictory thought: The world-machine might be running down, losing energy and organization, but biological systems, at least, were running up, becoming more, not less, organized.
By the early twentieth century, Einstein had come along to put the observer back into the system: The machine looked different—indeed, for all practical purposes it was different depending upon where you stood within it. But it was still a deterministic machine, and God did not throw dice. Next, the quantum people and the uncertainty folks attacked the model with pickaxes, sledgehammers, and sticks of dynamite.
Nevertheless, despite all the ifs, ands, and buts, it remains fair to say that the machine paradigm is still the "reference point" for physics and the core model of science in general. Indeed, so powerful is its continuing influence that much of social science, and especially economics, remains under its spell.
The importance of this book is not simply that it uses original arguments to challenge the Newtonian model, but also that it shows how the still valid, though much limited, claims of Newtonianism might fit compatibly into a larger scientific image of reality. It argues that the old "universal laws" are not universal at all, but apply only to local regions of reality. And
these happen to be the regions to which science has devoted the most effort.
Thus, in broad-stroke terms, Prigogine and Stengers argue that traditional science in the Age of the Machine tended to emphasize stability, order, uniformity, and equilibrium. It concerned itself mostly with closed systems and linear relationships in which small inputs uniformly yield small results.
With the transition from an industrial society based on heavy inputs of energy, capital, and labor to a high-technology society in which information and innovation are the critical resources, it is not surprising that new scientific world models should appear.
What makes the Prigoginian paradigm especially interesting is that it shifts attention to those aspects of reality that characterize today's accelerated social change: disorder, instability, diversity, disequilibrium, nonlinear relationships (in which small inputs can trigger massive consequences), and temporality—a heightened sensitivity to the flows of time.This work in the "Brussels school" may well represent the next revolution in science as it enters into a new dialogue not merely with nature, but with society itself.
The ideas of the Brussels school, add up to a novel, comprehensive theory of change. Summed up and simplified, they hold that while some parts of the universe may operate like machines, these are closed systems, and closed systems, at best, form only a small part of the physical universe. Most phenomena of interest to us are, in fact, open systems, exchanging energy or matter (and, one might add, information) with their environment. Surely biological and social systems are open, which means that the attempt to understand them in mechanistic terms is doomed to failure.
This suggests , moreover, that most of reality, instead of being orderly, stable, and equilibrial, is seething and bubbling with change, disorder, and process.
In Prigoginian terms, all systems contain subsystems, which are continually "fluctuating." At times, a single fluctuation or a combination of them may become so powerful, as a result of positive feedback, that it shatters the preexisting organization. At this revolutionary moment—the authors call it a "singular moment" or a "bifurcation point"—it is inherently impossible to determine in advance which direction change will take: whether the system will disintegrate into "chaos" or leap to a new, more differentiated, higher level of "order" or organization, which they call a "dissipative structure." (Such physical or chemical structures are termed dissipative because, compared with the simpler structures they replace, they require more energy to sustain them.)
One of the key controversies surrounding this concept has to do with Prigogine's insistence that order and organization can actually arise "spontaneously" out of disorder and chaos through a process of "self-organization."
To grasp this extremely powerful idea, we first need to make a distinction between systems that are in "equilibrium," systems that are "near equilibrium," and systems that are "far from equilibrium."
Imagine a primitive tribe. If its birthrate and death rate are equal, the size of the population remains stable. Assuming adequate food and other resources, the tribe forms part of a local system in ecological equilibrium.
Now increase the birthrate. A few additional births (without an equivalent number of deaths) might have little effect. The system may move to a near-equilibrium state. Nothing much happens. It takes a big jolt to produce big consequences in systems that are in equilibria] or near-equilibria] states.
But if the birthrate should suddenly soar, the system is pushed into a far-from-equilibrium condition, and here non-linear relationships prevail. In this state , systems do strange things. They become inordinately sensitive to external influences. Small inputs yield huge, startling effects. The entire system may reorganize itself in ways that strike us as bizarre.
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.
Even more spectacular are the "chemical clocks" described by Prigogine and Stengers. Imagine a million white ping-pong balls mixed at random with a million black ones, bouncing around chaotically in a tank with a glass window in it. Most of the time, the mass seen through the window would appear to be gray, but now and then, at irregular moments, the sample seen through the glass might seem black or white, depending on the distribution of the balls at that moment in the vicinity of the window.
Now imagine that suddenly the window goes all white, then all black, then all white again, and on and on, changing its color completely at fixed intervals-like a clock ticking.
Why do all the white balls and all the black ones suddenly organize themselves to change color in time with one another? By all the traditional rules, this should not happen at all. Yet, if we leave ping-pong behind and look at molecules in certain chemical reactions, we find that precisely such a self-organization or ordering can and does occur—despite what classical physics and the probability theories of Boltzmann tell us.
In far-from-equilibrium situations other seemingly spontaneous, often dramatic reorganizations of matter within time and space also take place. And if we begin thinking in terms of two or three dimensions, the number and variety of such possible structures become very great.
Now add to this an additional discovery. Imagine a situation in which a chemical or other reaction produces an enzyme whose presence then encourages further production of the same enzyme. This is an example of what computer scientists would call a positive-feedback loop. In chemistry it is called "auto-catalysis."Such situations are rare in inorganic chemistry. But in recent decades the molecular biologists have found that such loops (along with inhibitory or "negative" feedback and more complicated "cross-catalytic" processes) are the very stuff of life itself. Such processes help explain how we go from little lumps of DNA to complex living organisms. More generally, therefore, in far-from-equilibrium conditions we find that very small perturbations or fluctuations can become amplified into gigantic, structure-breaking waves.
And this sheds light on all sorts of "qualitative" or "revolutionary" change processes. When one combines the new insights gained from studying far-from-equilibrium states and nonlinear processes, along with these complicated feedback systems, a whole new approach is opened that makes it possible to relate the so-called hard sciences to the softer sciences of life-and perhaps even to social processes as well. (Such findings have at least analogical significance for social, economic or political realities. Words like "revolution," "economic crash," "technological upheaval," and "paradigm shift" all take on new shades of meaning when we begin thinking of them in terms of fluctuations, feedback amplification, dissipative structures, bifurcations, and the rest of the Prigoginian conceptual vocabulary.) It is these panoramic vistas that are opened to us by Order Out of Chaos.
Beyond this, there is the even more puzzling, pervasive issue of time.
Part of today's vast revolution in both science and culture is a reconsideration of time, and it is important enough to merit a brief digression here before returning to Prigogine's role in it. Take history, for example. One of the great contributions to historiography has been Braudel's division of time into three scales—"geographical time," in which events occur over the course of aeons; the much shorter "social time" scale by which economies, states, and civilizations are measured; and the even shorter scale of "individual time"—the history of human events.
In social science, time remains a largely unmapped terrain. Anthropology has taught us that cultures differ sharply in the way they conceive of time. For some, time is cyclical-history endlessly recurrent. For other cultures, our own included, time is a highway stretched between past and future, and people or whole societies march along it. In still other cultures, human lives are seen as stationary in time ; the future advances toward us, instead of us toward it.
Each society, as I've written elsewhere, betrays its own characteristic "time bias"—the degree to which it places emphasis on past, present, or future. One lives in the past. Another may be obsessed with the future.
Moreover, each culture and each person tends to think in terms of "time horizons." Some of us think only of the immediate—the now. Politicians, for example, are often criticized for seeking only immediate, short-term results. Their time horizon is said to be influenced by the date of the next election. Others among us plan for the long term. These differing time horizons are an overlooked source of social and political friction—perhaps among the most important.
But despite the growing recognition that cultural conceptions of time differ, the social sciences have developed little in the way of a coherent theory of time. Such a theory might reach across many disciplines, from politics to group dynamics and interpersonal psychology. It might, for example, take account of what, in Future Shock, I called "durational expectancies"—our culturally induced assumptions about how long certain processes are supposed to take.
We learn very early, for example, that brushing one's teeth should last only a few minutes, not an entire morning, or that when Daddy leaves for work, he is likely to be gone approximately eight hours, or that a "mealtime" may last a few minutes or hours, but never a year. (Television, with its division of the day into fixed thirty- or sixty-minute intervals, subtly shapes our notions of duration. Thus we normally expect the hero in a melodrama to get the girl or find the money or win the war in the last five minutes. In the United States we expect commercials to break in at certain intervals.) Our minds are filled with such durational assumptions. Those of children are much different from those of fully socialized adults, and here again the differences are a source of conflict.
Moreover, children in an industrial society are "time trained"—they learn to read the clock, and they learn to distinguish even quite small slices of time, as when their parents tell them, "You've only got three more minutes till bedtime!" These sharply honed temporal skills are often absent in slower-moving agrarian societies that require less precision in daily scheduling than our time-obsessed society.
Such concepts, which fit within the social and individual time scales of Braudel, have never been systematically developed in the social sciences. Nor have they, in any significant way, been articulated with our scientific theories of time, even though they are necessarily connected with our assumptions about physical reality. And this brings us back to Prigogine, who has been fascinated by the concept of time since boyhood. He once said to me that, as a young student, he was struck by a grand contradiction in the way science viewed time, and this contradiction has been the source of his life's work ever since.
In the world model constructed by Newton and his followers, time was an afterthought. A moment, whether in the present, past, or future, was assumed to be exactly like any other moment. The endless cycling of the planets—indeed, the operations of a clock or a simple machine—can, in principle , go either backward or forward in time without altering the basics of the system. For this reason, scientists refer to time in Newtonian systems as "reversible."
In the nineteenth century, however, as the main focus of physics shifted from dynamics to thermodynamics and the Second Law of thermodynamics was proclaimed, time suddenly became a central concern. For, according to the Second Law, there is an inescapable loss of energy in the universe. If the world machine is really running down and approaching the heat death, then it follows that one moment is no longer exactly like the last. You cannot run the universe backward to make up for entropy. Events over the long term cannot replay themselves. And this means that there is a directionality or, as Eddington later called it, an "arrow" in time. The whole universe is, in fact, aging. And, in turn, if this is true, time is a one-way street. It is no longer reversible, but irreversible.
In short, with the rise of thermodynamics, science split down the middle with respect to time. Worse yet, even those who saw time as irreversible soon also split into two camps. After all, as energy leaked out of the system, its ability to sustain organized structures weakened , and these, in turn, broke down into less organized, hence more random elements. But it is precisely organization that gives any system internal diversity. Hence, as entropy drained the system of energy, it also reduced the differences in it. Thus the Second Law pointed toward an increasingly homogeneous—and, from the human point of view, pessimistic-future.
Imagine the problems introduced by Darwin and his followers! For evolution, far from pointing toward reduced organization and diversity, points in the opposite direction.
Evolution proceeds from simple to complex, from "lower" to "higher" forms of life, from undifferentiated to differentiated structures. From a human point of view, all this is quite optimistic. The universe gets "better" organized as it ages, continually advancing to a higher level as time sweeps by. In this sense, scientific views of time may be summed up as a contradiction within a contradiction.
It is these paradoxes that Prigogine and Stengers set out to illuminate, asking, "What is the specific structure of dynamic systems which permits them to 'distinguish' between past and future? What is the minimum complexity involved?"
The answer, for them, is that time makes its appearance with randomness: "Only when a system behaves in a sufficiently random way may the difference between past and future, and therefore irreversibility, enter its description."
In classical or mechanistic science, events begin with "initial conditions," and their atoms or particles follow "world lines" or trajectories. These can be traced either backward into the past or forward into the future. This is just the opposite of certain chemical reactions, for example, in which two liquids poured into the same pot diffuse until the mixture is uniform or homogeneous. These liquids do not de-diffuse themselves. At each moment of time the mixture is different, the entire process is "time-oriented."
For classical science, at least in its early stages, such processes were regarded as anomalies, peculiarities that arose
from highly unlikely initial conditions.
It is Prigogine and Stengers' thesis that such time-dependent, one-way processes are not merely aberrations or deviations from a world in which time is irreversible. If anything, the opposite might be true, and it is reversible time, associated with "closed systems" (if such, indeed, exist in reality), that may well be the rare or aberrant phenomenon.
What is more , irreversible processes are the source of order—hence the title Order Out of Chaos. It is the processes
associated with randomness, openness, that lead to higher levels of organization, such as dissipative structures. Entropy is not merely a downward slide toward disorganization. Under certain conditions, entropy itself becomes the progenitor of order.
What the authors are proposing, therefore, is a vast synthesis that embraces both reversible and irreversible time, and shows how they relate to one another, not merely at the level of
macroscopic phenomena, but at the most minute level as well.
It is a breathtaking attempt at "putting the pieces back together again." The argument is complex, but it flashes with fresh insight and suggests a coherent way to relate seemingly unconnected—even contradictory&msdash;philosophical concepts.
Here we begin to glimpse, in full richness, the monumental synthesis proposed in these pages. By insisting that irreversible time is not a mere aberration, but a characteristic of much of the universe, they subvert classical dynamics. For Prigogine and Stengers, it is not a case of either/or. Of course, reversibility still applies (at least for sufficiently long times) but in closed systems only. Irreversibility applies to the rest of the universe.
Prigogine and Stengers also undermine conventional views of thermodynamics by showing that, under nonequilibrium conditions, at least, entropy may produce, rather than degrade, order, organization&msdash;and therefore life.
If this is so, then entropy, too, loses its either/or character. While certain systems run down, other systems simultaneously evolve and grow more coherent. This mutualistic, nonexclusive view makes it possible for biology and physics to coexist rather than merely contradict one another.
Finally, yet another profound synthesis is implied—a new relationship between chance and necessity.
The role of happenstance in the affairs of the universe has been debated, no doubt, since the first Paleolithic warrior accidently tripped over a rock. //In the Old Testament, God's will is sovereign, and He not only controls the orbiting planets but manipulates the will of each and every individual as He sees fit.incorrect As Prime Mover, all causality flows from Him, and all events in the universe are foreordained.
Sanguinary conflicts raged over the precise meaning of predestination or free will. No end of interpreters attempted to reconcile determinism with freedom of will. One ingenious view held that God did indeed determine the affairs of the universe, but that with respect to the free will of the individual, He never demanded a specific action. He merely preset the range of options available to the human decision-maker. Free will downstairs operated only within the limits of a menu determined upstairs.
In the secular culture of the Machine Age, hard-line determinism has more or less held sway. Even today, thinkers such as Rene Thorn reject the idea of chance as illusory and inherently unscientific. Faced with such philosophical stonewalling, some defenders of free will, spontaneity, and ultimate uncertainty, have taken equally uncompromising stands.
Two things seem to be happening to contemporary concepts of chance and determinism. To begin with, they are becoming more complex. As Edgar Morin has written: "... In place of the idea of sovereign, anonymous, permanent laws directing all things in nature there has been substituted the idea of laws of interaction... the problem of determinism has become that of the order of the universe. Order means that there are constraints, invariances, constancies, regularities in our universe... In place of the homogenizing and anonymous view of the old determinism, there has been substituted a diversifying and evolutive view of determinations."
As the concept of determinism has grown richer, new efforts have been made to recognize the co-presence of both chance and necessity, not with one subordinate to the other, but as full partners in a universe that is simultaneously organizing and de-organizing itself.
It is here that Prigogine and Stengers enter the arena. They not only demonstrate that both determinism and chance operate, they also attempt to show how the two fit together.
Thus, according to the theory of change implied in the idea of dissipative structures, when fluctuations force an existing system into a far-from-equilibrium condition and threaten its structure, it approaches a critical moment or bifurcation point. At this point it is inherently impossible to determine in advance the next state of the system. Chance nudges what remains of the system down a new path of development. Once that path is chosen (from among many), determinism takes over again until the next bifurcation point is reached.
Here we see chance and necessity not as irreconcilable opposites, but each playing its role as a partner in destiny. Yet another synthesis is achieved.
When we bring reversible time and irreversible time, disorder and order, physics and biology, chance and necessity all into the same novel frame, and stipulate their interrelationships, we have made a grand statement.
This sweeping synthesis has strong social and even political overtones. Just as the Newtonian model gave rise to analogies in politics, diplomacy, and other spheres seemingly remote from science, so, too, does the Prigoginian model lend itself to analogical extension. By offering rigorous ways of modeling qualitative change, for example, they shed light on the concept of revolution. By explaining how successive instabilities give rise to transformatory change, they illuminate organization theory. They throw a fresh light, as well, on certain psychological processes—innovation, for example, which the authors see as associated with "nonaverage" behaviour of the kind that arises under nonequilibrium conditions.
Even more significant, perhaps, are the implications for the study of collective behaviour. Prigogine and Stengers caution against leaping to genetic or sociobiological explanations for puzzling social behaviour. Many things that are attributed to biological pre-wiring are not produced by selfish, determinist genes, but rather by social interactions under nonequilibrium conditions.
No one—not even its authors—can appreciate the full implications of a work as crowded with ideas as "Order Out of Chaos". Each reader will no doubt come away puzzled by some passages (a few are simply too technical for the reader without scientific training); startled or stimulated by others (as their implications strike home); occasionally sceptical; yet intellectually enriched by the whole.
If one measure of a book is the degree to which it generates good questions, this one is surely successful. Here are just a couple that have haunted me.
How, outside a laboratory, might one define a "fluctuation"? What, in Prigoginian terms, does one mean by "cause" or "effect"? When the authors speak of molecules communicating with one another to achieve coherent, synchronized change, one may assume they are not anthropomorphising. But they raise for me a host of intriguing issues about whether all parts of the environment are signalling all the time, or only intermittently; about the indirect, second, and nth order communication that takes place, permitting a molecule or an organism to respond to signals which it cannot sense for lack of the necessary receptors. (A signal sent by the environment that is undetectable by A may be received by B and converted into a different kind of signal that A is properly equipped to receive—so that B serves as a relay/converter, and A responds to an environmental change that has been signalled to it via second-order communication.)
In connection with time, what do the authors make of the idea put forward by astronomer David Layzer, that we might conceive of three distinct "arrows of time"—one based on the continued expansion of the universe since the Big Bang; one based on entropy; and one based on biological and historical evolution?
Another question: How revolutionary was the Newtonian revolution? Prigogine and Stengers point out the continuity of Newton's ideas with alchemy and religious notions of even earlier vintage. Some readers might conclude from this that the rise of Newtonianism was neither abrupt nor revolutionary. Yet, to my mind, the Newtonian breakthrough should not be seen as a linear outgrowth of these earlier ideas. Indeed, it seems to me that the theory of change developed in Order Out of Chaos argues against just such a "continuist" view. Even if Newtonianism was derivative, this doesn't mean that the internal structure of the Newtonian world-model was actually the same or that it stood in the same relationship to its external environment.
The Newtonian system arose at a time when feudalism in Western Europe was crumbling—when the social system was, so to speak, far from equilibrium. The model of the universe proposed by the classical scientists (even if partially derivative) was applied analogously to new fields and disseminated successfully, not just because of its scientific power or "rightness," but also because an emergent industrial society based on revolutionary principles provided a particularly receptive environment for it.
As suggested earlier, machine civilization, in searching for an explanation of itself in the cosmic order of things, seized upon the Newtonian model and rewarded those who further developed it. It is not only in chemical beakers that we find auto-catalysis. For these reasons, it still makes sense to me to regard the Newtonian knowledge system as, itself, a "cultural dissipative structure" born of social fluctuation.
Ironically, as I've said, I believe their own ideas are central to the latest revolution in science, and I cannot help but see these ideas in relationship to the demise of the Machine Age and the rise of what I have called a "Third Wave" civilization. Applying their own terminology, we might characterize today's breakdown of industrial or "Second Wave" society as a civilizational "bifurcation," and the rise of a more differentiated, "Third Wave" society as a leap to a new "dissipative structure" on a world scale.
Finally, we come once more to the ever-challenging issue of chance and necessity. For if chance plays its role at or near the point of bifurcation, after which deterministic processes take over once more until the next bifurcation, are they not embedding chance, itself, within a deterministic framework? By assigning a particular role to chance, don't they de-chance it?
This question, however, I had the pleasure of discussing with Prigogine, who smiled over dinner and replied, "Yes. That would be true. But, of course, we can never determine when the next bifurcation will arise." Chance rises phoenix like once more. Order out of Chaos places science and humanity back in a world in which ceteris paribus is a myth—a world in which other things are seldom held steady, equal, or unchanging. In short, it projects science into today's revolutionary world of instability, disequilibrium, and turbulence. In so doing, it serves the highest creative function—it helps us create fresh order.