Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers (1984), Toronto and New York: Bantam Books (xxxi, 349 pp.; foreword by Alvin Toffler; LCCN 83021403; OCLC 10146336); also London: Heinemann and Boulder: New Science Library, 1984 — https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/10146336
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, as one of the works filling out the record’s coverage of Prigogine’s dissipative-structure programme. It is the programme’s statement for general readers, where the Nobel lecture (LIT-516) is its technical statement.
Unavailable because no lawful full text was reachable, so it is not read and
no NOTE is filed. What follows is only what the catalogue records show.
Contents (from the Internet Archive record of the Bantam scan “orderoutofchaosm0000prig”; the note runs headings together and stops in the third part, so the chapter boundaries below are read from its punctuation and the list is incomplete):
- Foreword, Alvin Toffler: “Science and Change”
- “Man’s New Dialogue with Nature”
- Introduction: “The Challenge to Science”
- Book One: The Delusion of the Universal
- Chapter 1: The Triumph of Reason (The New Moses; A Dehumanized World; The Newtonian Synthesis; The Experimental Dialog; The Myth at the Origin of Science; The Limits of Classical Science)
- The Identification of the Real (Newton’s Laws; Motion and Change; The Language of Dynamics; Laplace’s Demon)
- The Two Cultures (Diderot and the Discourse of Living; Kant’s Critical Ratification; A Philosophy of Nature? Hegel and Bergson; Process and Reality: Whitehead; “Ignoramus, ignorabimus”: the Positivist’s Strain; A New Start)
- Book Two: The Science of Complexity
- Energy and the Industrial Age (Heat, the Rival of Gravitation; The Principle of the Conservation of Energy; Heat Engines and the Arrow of Time; From Technology to Cosmology; The Birth of Entropy; Boltzmann’s Order Principle; Carnot and Darwin)
- The Three Stages of Thermodynamics (Flux and Force; Linear Thermodynamics; Far from Equilibrium; Beyond the Threshold of Chemical Instability; The Encounter with Molecular Biology; Bifurcations and Symmetry-Breaking; Cascading Bifurcations and the Transitions to Chaos; From Euclid to Aristotle)
- Order through Fluctuations (Fluctuations and Chemistry; Fluctuations and Correlations; The Amplification of Fluctuations; Structural Stability; Logistic Evolution; Evolutionary Feedback; Modelizations of Complexity; An Open World)
- Book Three: From Being to Becoming
- Rediscovering Time (A Change of Emphasis; The End of Universality; The Rise of Quantum Mechanics; Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Relation; The Temporal Evolution of Quantum Systems; A Nonequilibrium Universe)
- The Clash of Doctrines (Probability and Irreversibility; Boltzmann’s Breakthrough; Questioning Boltzmann’s Interpretation; …) — the note ends here.
Two contents headings bear directly on what the record holds. “Linear Thermodynamics” and “Far from Equilibrium” are the distinction the Nobel lecture draws around minimum entropy production. “The Encounter with Molecular Biology” is where the book presumably takes up the life-as-dissipation question that LIT-211’s “Dissipative Self-Organizing Systems” cluster rests on. Whether it does, and how far it goes, is for a reading to say.
Priority for a deeper reading: low. The technical claims are in the Nobel lecture, which was read. The book’s distinctive content is philosophical and historical (time, the “new alliance” of science and nature), and the reviews found would be the place to start on its reception.