A Nobel laureate’s late reflections on time, determinism, and the open-endedness of nature
What the Work Is
Is future given? is a short book by the Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine, first published in 2003, the year of his death. Running to roughly 145 pages, it belongs to the category of popular scientific and philosophical writing for which Prigogine was known in his later career. The catalog metadata classifies its subjects as chaotic behavior in systems, philosophy, science, space and time, and — notably — interviews, indicating that the volume gathers conversations and exchanges rather than presenting a single continuous treatise. It was issued by World Scientific.
Prigogine was a Russian-born Belgian chemist whose work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility earned him the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. That scientific background is the foundation for everything the book addresses.
What the Book Is About
The book’s governing question is contained in its title. Prigogine’s central contention, developed across his later writings, is that the future is not fixed in advance — that nature is genuinely creative and open-ended rather than the unfolding of a predetermined script. This position places him in direct opposition to the deterministic worldview that dominated physics from Newton through Einstein and Schrödinger, all of whom expressed their theories in terms of deterministic equations.
The book thus sits at the intersection of physics and philosophy, asking what modern science can legitimately say about time, predictability, and human freedom. It draws on Prigogine’s lifelong engagement with irreversibility — the fact that many natural processes run in only one direction — and argues that this feature of the world is not an illusion or a practical limitation but a fundamental characteristic of reality.
Key Ideas and Themes
The most prominent theme is the critique of determinism. Prigogine argues that determinism is no longer a viable scientific belief, contending that the more we learn about the universe, the harder it becomes to maintain that everything unfolds according to fixed, reversible laws. This is a significant departure from the classical tradition. According to Prigogine, determinism loses its explanatory power precisely where irreversibility and instability appear.
Central to this argument is the concept of the arrow of time. In deterministic physics, all processes are time-reversible — they can run backward as well as forward. Prigogine observes that determinism is fundamentally a denial of the arrow of time. If time has no direction, there is no privileged “present” that follows a settled past and precedes an open future; all of time is simply given, with the future as determined as the past. Irreversibility, by contrast, reintroduces direction to time. Prigogine points to numerous examples of irreversible processes: diffusion, radioactive decay, solar radiation, weather, and the emergence and evolution of life itself.
A related theme concerns instability and its consequences for prediction. Prigogine notes that organisms, like weather systems, are unstable systems existing far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Such systems resist standard deterministic explanation. Because they are sensitive to initial conditions, unstable systems can only be described statistically — in terms of probability rather than certainty. This is the connection between his argument and chaos theory, which he presents as the third great extension of Newtonian physics, following the introduction of spacetime in general relativity and the use of the wave function in quantum mechanics.
The book also reflects Prigogine’s broader intellectual project of reconciling scientific rigor with a creative, irreversible role for time in nature. His work on dissipative structures — systems that maintain or increase their organization through the importation and dissipation of energy — demonstrated that self-organization can arise spontaneously in systems far from equilibrium. This discovery, which won him the Nobel Prize, underpins the philosophical claims of Is future given?: if new structures can emerge through internal self-reorganization, then the universe is not a closed mechanical system but an evolving, generative one.
The theme of indeterminism extends into Prigogine’s work on quantum mechanics as well. In his later years he concentrated on the fundamental role of indeterminism in nonlinear systems at both the classical and quantum levels, and he and his collaborators proposed an extension of quantum mechanics formulated in what is called Liouville space — a mathematical structure richer than the standard Hilbert space, intended to address both the arrow-of-time problem in thermodynamics and the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. These technical developments inform the book’s broader argument that indeterminism is not a gap in our knowledge but a feature of physical reality.
Structure and Approach
The book takes the form of papers and interviews, a format that suits its accessible, conversational register. Rather than building a single sustained technical argument, it presents Prigogine’s ideas through multiple entries — some more formal, some dialogic — allowing readers to encounter his positions on time, determinism, and complexity from different angles. This structure reflects the book’s origin in Prigogine’s later career, when he frequently communicated his ideas to general audiences and engaged in philosophical debate beyond the confines of specialist journals.
Significance and Influence
Is future given? appeared at the end of a long and distinguished career and serves as a compact statement of the philosophical worldview that Prigogine had developed over decades. Its significance lies in its synthesis of rigorous thermodynamic research with broad questions about time, freedom, and the nature of scientific explanation. Prigogine’s work on dissipative structures had already led to pioneering research in self-organizing systems and to philosophical inquiries into the formation of complexity in biological entities, as well as the quest for a creative and irreversible role of time in the natural sciences. The book extends that legacy into explicitly philosophical territory.
The questions it raises — whether the future is genuinely open, whether determinism can survive the findings of modern physics, and what irreversibility tells us about the character of the universe — remain live concerns at the intersection of science and philosophy. For readers encountering Prigogine’s thought for the first time, the book offers an entry point into his central conviction: that time is not an illusion, that instability and creativity are woven into the fabric of nature, and that the future is, in a meaningful sense, not given.
Prigogine was born in Moscow a few months before the October Revolution of 1917, into a Jewish family. His father, Ruvim Abramovich Prigogine (1884–1974), was a chemist who studied at the Imperial Moscow Technical School and owned a paint factory; his mother, Yulia Leivikovna Vikhman (1892–?), was a pianist who attended the Moscow Conservatory. In 1921, the factory having been nationalized by the new Soviet regime and the feeling of insecurity rising amidst the civil war, the family left Russia. After a brief period in Lithuania, they went to Germany and settled in Berlin; eight years later, the poor economic situation and the creeping emergence of Nazism caused them to move on to Brussels, where Prigogine received Belgian nationality in 1949. His brother Alexandre (1913–1991) became an ornithologist.
As a teenager, Prigogine was interested in music, history and archeology. He graduated from the Athénée d’Ixelles in 1935, majoring in Greek and Latin. His parents encouraged him to become a lawyer, and he initially enrolled in law studies at the Free University of Brussels. At that time he developed an interest in psychology and the study of behavior; in turn, reading about these subjects triggered an interest in chemistry, as chemical processes impact the mind and body; this also triggered a more fundamental interest in physics, as they explain chemistry. He ended up dropping out from the law faculty. Prigogine afterwards simultaneously enrolled in chemistry and physics at the Free University of Brussels, something he achieved with “uncommon success”; he earned the equivalent of a Master’s degree in both disciplines in 1939, and a PhD in chemistry in 1941 under Théophile de Donder.
He started his research career under the German occupation of Belgium. From 1940 onwards he gave clandestine lectures to students. In 1941, the university formally closed to protest the forced appointment of Flemish pro-Nazi New Order professors by the occupiers; he continued giving clandestine lectures until the Liberation of Belgium in 1944. During that time window he also published 21 articles. In 1943, Prigogine and his future wife Hélène Jofé were arrested by the Germans; after multiple interventions including by the Queen Elisabeth, they were eventually released a couple of weeks later.
In 1951, he became a full professor at his alma mater; at 34 years old, he was the youngest ever full professor at the science faculty in Brussels. In 1959, he was appointed director of the International Solvay Institute in Brussels, Belgium. In that year, he also started teaching at the University of Texas at Austin in the United States, where he later was appointed Regental Professor and Ashbel Smith Professor of Physics and Chemical Engineering. From 1961 until 1966 he was affiliated with the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago and was a visiting professor at Northwestern University. In Austin, in 1967, he co-founded the Center for Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics, now the Center for Complex Quantum Systems. In that year, he also returned to Belgium, where he became director of the Center for Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics.
He was a member of numerous scientific organizations, and received numerous awards, prizes and 53 honorary degrees. In 1955, Prigogine was awarded the Francqui Prize for Exact Sciences. For his study in irreversible thermodynamics, he received the Rumford Medal in 1976, and in 1977, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures”. In 1989, he was awarded the title of viscount in the Belgian nobility by the King of the Belgians. Until his death, he was president of the International Academy of Science, Munich and was in 1997, one of the founders of the International Commission on Distance Education (CODE), a worldwide accreditation agency. Prigogine received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1985 and in 1998 he was awarded an honoris causa doctorate by the UNAM in Mexico City.
Prigogine was first married to Belgian poet Hélène Jofé (as an author also known as Hélène Prigogine) and in 1945 they had a son Yves. After their divorce, he married Polish-born chemist Maria Prokopowicz (also known as Maria Prigogine) in 1961. In 1970 they had a son, Pascal. In 2003 he was one of 22 Nobel Laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto.
Additional Research Context
In his 1955 text, Prigogine drew connections between dissipative structures and the Rayleigh-Bénard instability and the Turing mechanism. His 1977 work on self-reorganization was recognized as relevant for psychology. With professor Robert Herman, he also developed the basis of the two fluid model, a traffic model in traffic engineering for urban networks, analogous to the two fluid model in classical statistical mechanics, a common problem that had attracted Prigogine’s attention some years before. Prigogine’s formal concept of self-organization was used also as a “complementary bridge” between general systems theory and thermodynamics, conciliating the cloudiness of some important systems theory concepts such as entropy instead of molecular disorder, and emergence, fluctuations and irreversibility instead of “birth and death” with scientific rigor.
Prigogine co-authored several books with Isabelle Stengers, including The End of Certainty and La Nouvelle Alliance (Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature). In his 1996 book, La Fin des certitudes, written in collaboration with Isabelle Stengers and published in English in 1997 as The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature, 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. This led to the field of statistical mechanics and the realization that gases undergo irreversible processes.
The Ilya Prigogine Prize for Thermodynamics
The Ilya Prigogine Prize for Thermodynamics was initialized in 2001 and patronized by Ilya Prigogine himself until his death in 2003. It is awarded on a biennial basis during the Joint European Thermodynamics Conference (JETC) and considers all branches of thermodynamics (applied, theoretical, and experimental as well as quantum thermodynamics and classical thermodynamics).
