ilya_prigogine_isabelle_stengers_alvin_tofflerbookfi-org

xxv
FOREWORD: SCIENCE AND CHANGE
nized change, one may assume they are not anthropomorphiz·
ing. But they raise for me a host of intriguing issues about
whether all parts of the environment are signaling 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 signaled
to it via second-order communication.)
In connection with time, what do the authors make of the
idea put forward by Harvard 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? Taking issue with some historians, 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 intc;:rnal 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