Time, the fundamental dimension of our existence, has fascinated artists, philosophers, and scientists of every culture and every century. All of us can remember a moment as a child when time became a personal reality, when we realized what a 'year' was, or asked ourselves when 'now' happened. Common sense says time moves forward, never backward, from cradle to grave. Nevertheless, Einstein said that time is an illusion. Nature's laws, as he and Newton defined them, describes a timeless, deterministic universe within which we can make predictions with complete certainty. In effect, these great physicists contended that time is reversible and thus meaningless.

The research of Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine has in recent years brought about a radical change of perspective. Scientists have continued to discover instabilities and fluctuations that lead to evolutionary patterns on all levels of existence, from the cosmology of the universe to the biology of molecules. Time-reversible processes are rare in the real world and irrversible ondes (such as scrambling an egg) are occuring all around us every day - but not until Prigogine did anyone seriously attempt to include this obvious irreversible flow of time in the laws of physics. In doing so, he transformed physics, giving it a new cultural relevance. In the arts, medicine, business, social science, and technology, professionals have acknowledged their debt to his fundamental and resounding insights.

In his book 'The End of Certainty' Prigogine presents to the general reader his profound break with the classical description of nature, examining the Western approach to time and showing that as we follow the probalistic processes of the real world, we travel far beyond the dead mechanics of determinism. In expounding his argument, he leads us on a marvelous intellectual adventure beginning with the Greeks, through Newtonian trajectory and deterministic chaos, and onward to the heights of a unified formulation of quantum theory and 'free lunch' cosmology. His dramatic findings include that quantum mechanics can be extended to demonstrate time's natural irriversibility, and further, he argues that time actually preceded the Big Bang.

Prigogine deconstructs the deterministic world view, but does not champion the idea of an abitrary universe of pure chance. Instead, he argues, we live in a world of definable probabilities where life and matter evolve continously in the direction of time, and certainty itself is the illusion. Notions such as 'self-organization' that Prigogine introduced in previous work now take their place within a rigorous and consistent scientific world view. As this watershed book shows, the end of certainty is the birth of a whole new formulation of the natural laws of both science and culture.

Viscount Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, is the Director of the Ilya Prigogine Center of Statistical Mechanics, Thermodynamics and Complex Systems in Austin, Texas, and the Director of the Solvay Institute of Physics and Chemistry in Brussels. The recipient of honorary degrees from more than forty universities around the world, Prigogine has had five institutes devoted to the study of complex systems named for him.