Our vision of the world around us is undergoing a radical change toward the multiple,[1] the temporal, and the complex. It is true that there are phenomena that appear to us as deterministic and reversible, but there are also irreversible processes that involve an arrow of time.
In the classical view the basic processes of nature were considered to be deterministic and reversible. Processes involving randomness or irreversibility were considered only exceptions. Today we see everywhere the role of irreversible processes, of fluctuations.
Although Western science has stimulated an extremely fruitful dialogue between man and nature, some of its cultural consequences have been disastrous. The dichotomy between the
"two cultures" is to a large extent due to the conflict between
the atemporal view of classical science and the time-oriented
view that prevails in a large part of the social sciences and
humanities. But in the past few decades, we are becoming
more and more conscious of the fact that on all levels, from
elementary particles to cosmology, randomness and irreversibility play an ever-increasing role.
We have only begun to understand the level of nature on which we live.
Our scientific heritage includes two basic questions to which till now no answer was provided. One is the relation between disorder and order. The famous law of increase of entropy describes the world as evolving from order to disorder; still, biological or social evolution shows us the complex emerging from the simple. How is this possible? How can structure arise from disorder? Great progress has been realized in this question. We know now that nonequilibrium, the flow of matter and energy, may be a source of order.
But there is the second question, even more basic: classical
or quantum physics describes the world as reversible, as
static. In this description there is no evolution, neither to
order nor to disorder; the "information," as may be defined
from dynamics, remains constant in time. Therefore there is
an obvious contradiction between the static view of dynamics
and the evolutionary paradigm [of thermodynamics]. What is
irreversibility? What is entropy? Order and disorder are
complicated notions: the units involved in the static description of dynamics are not the same as those that have to be introduced to achieve the evolutionary paradigm as expressed by the growth of entropy. This transition leads to a new concept of matter, matter that is "active," as matter leads to irreversible processes and as irreversible processes organize matter.
Time and reality are closely related. For humans, reality is embedded in the flow of time. As we shall see, the irreversibility of time is itself closely connected to entropy. To make time flow backward we would have to overcome an infinite
entropy barrier.
We have a feeling of great intellectual excitement: we begin to have a glimpse of the road that leads from being to becoming. For too long there appeared a conflict between what seemed to be eternal, to be out of time, and what was in time. We see now that there is a more subtle form of reality involving both time and eternity.
The human race is in a period of transition. Science is likely
to play an important role at this moment of demographic explosion. It is therefore more important than ever to keep open
the channels of communication between science and society. The present development of Western science has taken it outside the cultural environment of the seventeenth century, in which it was born. We believe that science today carries a universal message that is more acceptable to different cultural traditions.
Footnotes
By this I take it to mean the many as opposed to the singular. The plurality as opposed to the singularity. The composite as opposed to its individual components. We are becoming
more and more conscious of the fact that on all levels, from
elementary particles to cosmology, randomness and irrevers
ibility play an ever-increasing role. ↩︎