ilya_prigogine_isabelle_stengers_alvin_tofflerbookfi-org

CONCLUSION
FROM EARTH TO HEAVEN­
THE REENCHANTMENT
OF NATURE
In any attempt to bridge the domains of experience belonging
to the spiritual and physical s1des of our nature, time occupies
the key position.
A. S. EDDINGTON1
An Open Science
Science certainly involves manipulating nature, but it is also
an attempt to understand it, to dig deeper into questions that
have been asked generation after generation. One of these questions
runs like a leitmotiv, almost as an obsession, through this
book, as it does through the history of science and philosophy.
This is the question of the relation between being and becoming,
between permanence and change.
We have mentioned pre-Socratic speculations: Is change,
whereby things are born and die, imposed from the outside on
some kind of inert matter? Or is it the result of the intrinsic and
independent activity of matter? Is an external driving force
necessary, or is becoming inherent in matter? Seventeenthcentury
science arose in opposition to the biological model of
a spontaneous and autonomous organization of natural beings.
But it was confronted with another fundamental alternative. Is
nature intrinsically random? Is ordered behavior merely the
transient result of the chance collisions of atoms and of their
unstable associations?
One of the main sources of fascination in modern science
was precisely the feeling that it had discovered eternal laws at
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