[Druspills]

I love books and they are my virtual world. xxxxxxxxx

I like your phrase. You have made me to admit that I have a virtual world too! Yes, I love books. I am starting The End of Certainty. Seems to be a good book because I am a fan of Ilya Prigogine.

Theoretical Physics spread into two main branches because of two great physics: Einstein and Bohr. The first one, IMO, got lost in fairy tales about rulers that do not play with dice, time traveling machines and the like and his theoretical heritage was taken by Stephen Hawkins who get entangled, too, in a speculative mess between god and the laws of physics.

The imagined solution for this has been the concept of "Intelligent Design" that ends in the same thing: Determinism. Determinism is the intellectual son of Religion and has gone far away from his mother to live between philosophers like Gabriel Marcel, Henri Bergson and the like and some theoretical physicists, evolutionary biologists, a bunch of sociologists, etc.

The other branch, with which I agree, was founded by Neils Bohr and developed a much more practical sense of doing and explaining quantum physics with out rulers, time machines and other Harry Potter like physics that became a dead end for this field of knowledge.

From Bohr to the present we can found outstanding people like Enrico Fermi, Richard Fynman, Stwart Bell, John Wheeler, Angelo Besso, the founder guys of the extraordinaire field of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute in California, etc. Between all them there is Ilya Prigogine who has explored Thermodynamics of living systems, death and the arrow of time.

The End of Certainty is critical review against the saying of Einstein that time is an illusion; that Newton and Einstein were caught into the same basic idea: A Timeless Deterministic Universe that can be accurately predicted, where time is reversible and meaningless.

For Ilya this is not the case. For him, time is irreversible and must be taken into account. The Bohr's branch of theoretical physics, taken further by Ilya, understand things as non-Deterministic but not meaning pure chance and chaotic behaviour. This non-Deterministic universe is founded in the laws of physics where time is real. That is not about Determinism, but Probability. More less this is what the book is about.

Just look at this. Take for example the Deterministic germ that has plagued our understanding. In the realm of a god that do not play with dice everything can be determined and this has a psychological effect of being safe. Religions do the same thing. Karma (the Pali Kamma is slight different from the sanskrit Karma) when understood in terms of deterministic behaviour make us thought that every time we do something we deserve something perfectly determined but we do not say, that there is just a high probability to get something. The second one understands Karma as a complex evolving system in a non-deterministic way. This slight shift brings us a completely different approach to life and things we do, and face us into how we take for granted many stuff that is not so.

When the dice are thrown they obey the laws of physics but there is no certainty about the final outcome , just a probability of occurrence; this makes life really enjoyable and, maybe, Einstein's god is amused with dice games. So, even being god, once the dice have been thrown, nobody can reverse the event, and Probability appears in the scene with a joyful laugh.