ilya_prigogine_isabelle_stengers_alvin_tofflerbookfi-org

xix
FOREWORD: SCIENCE AND CHANGE
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 diffe rences 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 Braude!, 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.
And, 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. Yo u 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.