Book Review: The End of Certainty

This is the book by Ilya Prigogine that I will send people to. It's genuinely for a general audience and seems to have been influenced by the success of A Brief History of Time. I actually think this book is more interesting than Hawking's, but I'm a chemist, so of course I would. Even here, fascinating connections are made and not fleshed out: I'm particularly intrigued by connections to music, and his frequent insistence that non-equilibrium dissipative systems allow matter to "see." Most of his argument from On Being and Becoming is recapitulated here, and its later publication date allows for more interaction with the scientific community (although he doesn't really engage with critics significantly, I guess when you've got a Nobel prize you don't worry about that so much?). This is a book with an argument that catches fire and makes connections you never saw coming. Time itself is reformulated. I haven't had time yet to be completely convinced, but I do want to think more about how the cosmos is musical from the description Prigogine gives.