A Nobel laureate’s argument that time, chaos, and instability unseat determinism
What the Work Is
The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature is a work of scientific and philosophical argument by the physical chemist Ilya Prigogine, written in collaboration with the philosopher Isabelle Stengers. It first appeared in French in 1996 as La Fin des certitudes and was published in English in 1997. Prigogine, a Belgian chemist of Russian origin, had won the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures. The book is his sustained case, aimed at a broad readership, that determinism can no longer be maintained as a viable scientific belief.
What the Book Is About
The book’s central contention is that determinism has lost its explanatory power. Prigogine’s claim, as he puts it, is that the more we come to know about our universe, the harder it becomes to believe in determinism. This positions the book as a deliberate break from the tradition of Newton, Einstein, and Schrödinger, all of whom expressed their theories through deterministic equations. Where that tradition treats the laws of nature as fully reversible and the future as already contained in the present, Prigogine argues that irreversibility and instability are fundamental features of the world that deterministic description cannot capture. The book is therefore not merely a technical report but a philosophical reorientation: it seeks to restore time, in its irreversible and creative sense, to the center of physics.
Key Ideas and Themes
The argument turns on the concept of the arrow of time. In deterministic physics, all processes are time-reversible — they can run backward as well as forward. Prigogine treats determinism as, at bottom, a denial of the arrow of time. If there is no arrow, there is no privileged “present” standing between a determined past and an undetermined future; all of time is simply given, with the future no more open than the past. Irreversibility, by contrast, reintroduces the arrow. Prigogine points to a wide range of irreversible phenomena — diffusion, radioactive decay, solar radiation, weather, and the emergence and evolution of life — as evidence that irreversibility is not an illusion or a mere approximation but a real feature of nature.
A second theme is instability. Prigogine describes organisms, and weather systems, as unstable systems existing far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Such systems resist standard deterministic explanation. Because they are sensitive to their initial conditions, unstable systems can only be described statistically — in terms of probability rather than certainty. This is where the book’s title finds its meaning: the end of certainty is the recognition that for a vast class of real systems, prediction must give way to probabilistic description.
Prigogine also offers a historical narrative for how the dispute over determinism arose. He traces it back to Darwin, whose attempt to explain individual variability through evolving populations inspired Ludwig Boltzmann to explain the behavior of gases in terms of populations of particles rather than individual particles. That move gave rise to statistical mechanics and to the recognition that gases undergo irreversible processes. In this way, the book connects biology’s population thinking to the physics of irreversible change.
Finally, Prigogine frames the whole development as an extension of physics rather than a rejection of it. He asserts that Newtonian physics has been extended three times: first by the introduction of spacetime in general relativity, then by the use of the wave function in quantum mechanics, and finally by the recognition of indeterminism in the study of unstable systems — the domain of chaos theory. Each extension, in his account, widens physics without discarding what came before.
Structure and Approach
The book is written in collaboration with Isabelle Stengers, with whom Prigogine also co-authored Order Out of Chaos (La Nouvelle Alliance). It is addressed to general readers rather than specialists, presenting its case through argument and historical narrative rather than through technical exposition alone. Its method is to move between the history of scientific ideas — Darwin, Boltzmann, Newton, Einstein, Schrödinger — and the conceptual claims Prigogine draws from his own research on irreversibility and unstable systems.
Significance and Influence
The book belongs to the later phase of Prigogine’s career, in which he concentrated on the fundamental role of indeterminism in nonlinear systems at both the classical and quantum levels. His broader research program on dissipative structures had already led to pioneering work on self-organizing systems and to philosophical inquiry into how complexity arises in living things and into the search for a creative, irreversible role for time in the natural sciences. The End of Certainty gave that program its most accessible statement, arguing that the sciences of complexity and irreversibility demand a rethinking of what a law of nature is.
Prigogine was born in Moscow a few months before the October Revolution of 1917, into a Jewish family. His father, Ruvim Abramovich Prigogine, was a chemist who studied at the Imperial Moscow Technical School and owned a paint factory; his mother, Yulia Leivikovna Vikhman, 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 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; reading about these subjects triggered an interest in chemistry, as chemical processes impact the mind and body, which in turn triggered a more fundamental interest in physics. He ended up dropping out of the law faculty, and afterwards simultaneously enrolled in chemistry and physics at the Free University of Brussels, earning 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 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, 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. 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.
Research Beyond the Book
Prigogine defined dissipative structures and their role in thermodynamic systems far from equilibrium, a discovery that won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977. In summary, he discovered that importation and dissipation of energy into chemical systems could result in the emergence of new structures (hence dissipative structures) due to internal self reorganization. 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.
Dissipative structure theory led to pioneering research in self-organizing systems, as well as philosophical inquiries into the formation of complexity in biological entities and the quest for a creative and irreversible role of time in the natural sciences. 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.
In his later years, his work concentrated on the fundamental role of indeterminism in nonlinear systems on both the classical and quantum level. Prigogine and coworkers proposed a Liouville space extension of quantum mechanics. A Liouville space is the vector space formed by the set of (self-adjoint) linear operators, equipped with an inner product, that act on a Hilbert space. There exists a mapping of each linear operator into Liouville space, yet not every self-adjoint operator of Liouville space has a counterpart in Hilbert space, and in this sense Liouville space has a richer structure than Hilbert space. The Liouville space extension proposal by Prigogine and co-workers aimed to solve the arrow of time problem of thermodynamics and the measurement problem of quantum mechanics.
Related Works and Recognition
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). His other publications include Chemical Thermodynamics (1954, with R. Defay), Introduction to Thermodynamics of Irreversible Processes (1955), The Molecular Theory of Solutions (1957), Non-equilibrium Statistical Mechanics (1962), Surface Tension and Adsorption (1966, with R. Defay), Thermodynamics Theory of Structure, Stability and Fluctuations (1971, with Paul Glansdorff), Kinetic Theory of Vehicular Traffic (1971, with R. Herman), Self-Organization in Non-Equilibrium Systems (1977, with G. Nicolis), From Being to Becoming (1980), Exploring Complexity: An Introduction (1989, with G. Nicolis), Chaotic Dynamics and Transport in Fluids and Plasmas (1993), Modern Thermodynamics: From Heat Engines to Dissipative Structures (1998, with Dilip Kondepudi), and Is Future Given? (2003). He also co-authored The Liouville Space Extension of Quantum Mechanics (1997, with T. Petrosky) and edited, with Stuart A. Rice, the Advances in Chemical Physics book series published by John Wiley & Sons.
The Ilya Prigogine Prize for Thermodynamics was initialized in 2001 and patronized by 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).
