The end of certainty

What Hacker News says

1. jamesblondeDec 2014
   My biggest issue with Jeremey England is that he's basically rehashing Ilya Prigogine's ideas. Read Prigogine's books "order out of chaos", " Exploring complexity: An introduction" (best one), and less so "The End of Certainty". Prigogine won the Nobel prize for his "discovery" of dissipative structures, and he was a driving force in the ideas behind complexity theory. Wolfram's early work was full of references to Prigogine, but then Wolfram decided to write him out of history. As did England above. Progigine was derided for his ideas: http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notabene/prigo... I think the ideas are great, but we have some work to do.
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2. ganzuulApr 2022
   > The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature, Prigogine contends that determinism is no longer a viable scientific belief: "The more we know about our universe, the more difficult it becomes to believe in determinism." This is a major departure from the approach of Newton, Einstein and Schrödinger, all of whom expressed their theories in terms of deterministic equations. According to Prigogine, determinism loses its explanatory power in the face of irreversibility and instability.

   > Prigogine traces the dispute over determinism back to Darwin, whose attempt to explain individual variability according to evolving populations inspired Ludwig Boltzmann to explain the behavior of gases in terms of populations of particles rather than individual particles.[24] This led to the field of statistical mechanics and the realization that gases undergo irreversible processes. In deterministic physics, all processes are time-reversible, meaning that they can proceed backward as well as forward through time. As Prigogine explains, determinism is fundamentally a denial of the arrow of time. With no arrow of time, there is no longer a privileged moment known as the "present," which follows a determined "past" and precedes an undetermined "future." All of time is simply given, with the future as determined or as undetermined as the past. With irreversibility, the arrow of time is reintroduced to physics.

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