Order Out of Chaos
Burns, David
one man is an injustice against humankind. We care, because in the oppression of anyone it is the human race that is being oppressed. Nothing is explained because nothing has an explanation in...
...Information and innovation are critical, and the modern world is dominated by nonlinear relationships in which small inputs can trigger massive consequences...
...Einstein pointed out that the machine looked different, in fact was different, depending on where you stood within it...
...Traditional science emphasized stability, order, uniformity, and equilibrium, and was concerned mainly with closed systems in which, like a machine, there is a linear relationship between input and result...
...And this power is, I should suggest, the residual magic Of myth...
...Nothing is explained because nothing has an explanation in an inhuman society: "Why have I been sent here...
...the machine could not go on forever...
...Leo Pfeffer, quoting dissenting Justice William Brennan, claims that Jewish quiescence...
...The display, taken as a whole, also helped bring business into the downtown Pawtucket area...
...He was born in Moscow at the outbreak of the Revolution, and his family fled first to Lithuania, then Berlin, before settling in Belgium...
...may have reflected nothing more than their sense of futility Commonweal: 412...
...Nor had the creche caused political divisiveness in Pawtucket prior to the filing of the instant lawsuit...
...Their language is remarkably clear and mainly nontechnical, but their ideas are wide-ranging and complex...
...it also implied a beginning...
...The Clause erects a "blurred, indistinct, and variable barrier depending on all the circumstances of a particular relationship...
...to subscribe to COMMONWEAL simply complete this coupon or send a facsimile to COMMONWEAL 232 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y...
...That is the plight of All systems on 'go' ORKR OUT Or CUO| MAN'S NEW BIALOGUE WITH NATURE Iiya Pl'igogine and Isabelle Stengers Bantam, $8.95, 349 pp...
...Prigogine discusses the kinetics of chemical instabilities, in which substances oscillate periodically between FATHER JOHN W. PAWLIKOWSKI, O.S.M., is an assoc~e professor of religion at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago...
...The metaphors and myths of science help us make sense of the diversity of natural phenomena...
...But in the past few decades, something very dramatic has been happening in science, something as unexpected as the birth of geometry or the grand vision of the cosmos as expressed in Newton's work...
...Correspondence (Continued from page 386) unwavering than due process can be defined in a single stroke or phrase or test...
...Prigogine and Stengers argue that order and coherence often arise spontaneously from disorder and chaos, and they offer a variety of examples ranging from the clumping of interstellar matter to the self-aggregation of insect colonies...
...The Second Law required an end...
...In time, the sub-system can impose a new quasi-equilibrium...
...Moreover, the world we perceive is dominated by exponential change, often leading to disorder, instability, disequilibrium...
...Coetzee's myth is, in this sense, more powerful than countless political pamphlets, and that of course is the strength of literature...
...The Pawtucket crrche, by contrast, is valued at $200, and erecting and dismantling it costs the city only about $20 per year, plus minimal expenses for lighting...
...Feedbacks can reinforce the fluctuations until a sub-system becomes dominant...
...ALBERTO MANGUEL teaches at York University in Toronto...
...In Michael K's story, Coetzee has recreated the myth of the wanderer -- the Wandering Jew, the Flying Dutchman -the man who tries to find, and is denied, a place on this earth...
...The metaphor is no longer a machine obeying "laws," but of biological organisms in dynamic evolution...
...Third, even Federal District Judge Pettine found that there has been no entanglement between church authorities and the state regarding either the content or design of the exhibit concerning the creche...
...NOW IN PAPERBACK $3 u 13Ju~1984:411dynamics including the global oceanatmosphere system which determines the climate, has made clear that much behavior is non-linear -- everything is connected to everything else, and the fate of one bit depends on all the other bits...
...But most systems of interest to us -whether societies or snowflakes -- are open systems, fueled by a constant exchange of energy and matter with their environment...
...David Burns p UBLISHED BY Gallimard in 1979 under the title, La nouvelle alliance, this book by the winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in chemistry and philosopher-scientist Isabelle Stengers, has been a European best-seller...
...Ilya Prigogine is a physical chemist who directs Solvay Institute and teaches at the Free University of Brussels and at the Center for Studies in Statistical Mechanics at the University of Texas...
...The display is sponsored by the city to celebrate the holiday and to depict the origins of that holiday...
...Prigogine and Stengers argue that the laws of classical physics work best when applied to closed systems and to local regions of reality...
...These models also limit our view of reality...
...Literature," says Andr6 Brink, "angers the advocates of the brave new world precisely because they fear the harm it can do to their devastatingly logical systems and tyrannies: that is, because it has some mysterious power in a world that would like to pretend an evolution beyond the need of mystery...
...Newton, hailed as "The New Moses," deduced the laws of mass, acceleration, and inertia...
...Science is rediscovering time...
...Whether in chemistry or sociology, the reinforcing feedbacks are crucial...
...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...
...Quantum physics explored the paradox that, at the subatomic level at least, the machine was no more than a fortuitous probabilistic assemblage of random distributions...
...Literature in our world fulfills what it can of the function of myth in a seemingly more simple society...
...My article noted that "the chief minority group likely to be offended, our Jewish brethren, did not join in the suit to ban the creche...
...He is co-author of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places...
...The study of turbulence and fluid I ~ I III II I I II . . . . . . PONTIFF by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts A behind-the-scenes look at the side of The Vatican the public doesn't see: a shocking, fascinating and immensely readable expos~ of the people and politics surrounding the lives of the last three Popes...
...It is this conceptual revolution that this book sets out to describe...
...It has also been a catalyst for an intellectual bun-fight among disciplines as diverse as entomology and epistemology...
...It was once again reasonable to imagine an arrow of time...
...How long do I have to stay...
...heat death was our ultimate fate...
...This is what tile authors call a "singular moment" or a "bifurcation point...
...The dichotomy between the 'two cultures,'" write Prigogine and Stengers, "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...
...This paradigm viewed the universe as a kind of wind-up toy, a machine which could run forward or backward, essentially timeless...
...The majority found that Pawtucket did, indeed, have a secular purpose for including the crrche in the overall display...
...Therthe oppressed...
...A Book-of-the-Month Club Featured Alternate...
...Second, as my article pointed out, the Supreme Court has approved much greater expenditures of public money which indirectly aided religion than what was involved in Pawtucket -- for textbooks and transportation for students attending church-sponsored schools and for college buildings of church-affiliated institutions which combine secular and religious instruction, for example...
...If the initial conditions were known, these immutable laws could predict the outcome...
...The authors have now translated their book, in the process rewriting the central section...
...24 [] Two years, $43 [] l l-issue trial, $9 Marne Address City, State Zip 7113/84 one state ("red") and another ("blue...
...Prigogine notes that all such systems contain sub-systems which are in constant flux...
...10016 [] One year...
...modynamics showed that useful energy was irrevocably lost...
...In the Age of Steam, physicists began to challenge the timelessness implicit in the mechanistic image...
...Sometimes called the "poet of thermodynamics," Prigogine is also an accomplished classical pianist and widely read in literature, archeology, art, and history...
...Darwin's followers introduced a contradictory thought: the machine might be running down, but biological systems, at least, were running up, becoming more, not less, organized...
...they produce "self-organization" or "autocatalysis...
...Michael wants to ask the guard in the resettlement camp...
...DAVID BURNS i$ a project director at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington...
...The micro-world was governed by chance, and God threw the dice...
...But the guard went on sleeping, and K lacked the courage to shout...
...This humanistic background may have prompted him to search for a new scientific metaphor -- the prospect that man can understand, and be reassured by, a Nature that allows"order" to emerge from "chaos...
Vol. 111 • July 1984 • No. 13
