For my own reference mostly: every mention of Prigogine (duplicates removed hopefully) from _The Concept of Time in Early Twentieth-Century Philosophy_. After dups removed, ended up with 54. Hopefully this will give me a ‘gist’ index to then search further from.
The Concept of Time in Prigogine 229
Commentary: Einstein, Prigogine, Barbour, and Their
In addition, such considerations allow us also to recognize in Bergson the merit of having anticipated with foresight some methodological shifts that in the scientific realm would be verified only many years after his intuitions, like for example, the renunciation by the natural sciences to place reality inside a single deterministic schema (Prigogine and Stengers 1988). Not unlike Augustine, still today we do not know what time is but it is to the complete definition of Aristotle that, after the discovery in physics of complex systems and of the laws of chaos, we can lead back the laws of motion (Prigogine and Stengers 1979). The intrinsic measurement of motion imposes the perspective of a before and after. Motion conceived by Galileo and his successors articulated the instant and eternity. In every instant, the system was defined by a state that contained the truth of its past and of its future. Motion as we conceive of it today gives a width to the instant and links it to becoming. Every instantaneous state is a memory of a past that permits one to define only a limited future, circumscribed by an intrinsic temporal horizon. The definition of the
Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1979). La Nouvelle Alliance. Métamorphose de la science. Paris: Gallimard.
Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1988). Entre le temps et l’éternité. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard. Pais, A. (1982). ‘Subtle is the Lord…’—The science and the life of Albert Einstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Szendrei, E. V. (1989). Bergson, Prigogine and the rediscovery of time. Process Studies, 18(3), 181–193.
In contrast with classical Newtonian physics, Einsteinian theory does not place matter within an indifferent reticulated space, but describes a reciprocal relation between matter and the metric properties of space-time, which absorbs it. Einstein’s restricted theory of relativity remains linked to a metrics characterized by a curvature nothing like that of Euclidean space; however, this metric does not space alone, but also time. Restricted relativity defines a new invariant, a new distance no longer between two points, as in Galilean and Newtonian physics, but between two spatiotemporal events. Different observers moving toward each other in uniform, rectilinear motion can no longer agree either on the distance between two events or on the time that has elapsed between them; they can only agree on the spa-tiotemporal interval that separates the events. It is this physical quantity, or new invariant, that is maintained when one passes from one inert observer to the other. This implies that each observer will see a source of light shift in the void in such a way that the interval mentioned above is canceled out. For all these observers, therefore, the speed of light will have the same value. It is in relation to this four-dimensional continuum that Einstein reinterprets the acceleration caused by the forces of gravitational interaction. From the definition of the curvature in one region of the universe, there is derived the definition of the motion of a test body in this region. Einstein’s equations therefore describe a space-time that reacts in the presence of matter, a matter sensitive to the curvature of space-time. More precisely, the fundamental equation of general relativity links two mathematical objects called tensors: the metric tensor which describes the curvature of space-time in the region of the universe in question and the impulse-energy tensor that defines the content of matter of that region in terms of density and pressure. General relativity, which is at the basis of the st …
1970s, the creation of entropy-bearing matter cannot be traced back to a reversible phenomenon any more than the excited quantum atom can be traced back to mechanics. In this perspective, it is the very production of entropy that constitutes the real “price” of the passage to the existence of our universe and that constitutes, therefore, the difference between this material universe and an empty one. The possibility of defining such a difference and the passage to existence has recently led to some attempts to generalize Einstein’s equations, allowing us to describe an irreversible process of the creation of matter. Thus, according to the Brussels school, one can substitute for the initial singularity sustained by standard model, an instability that leads to a simultaneous creation of the matter and entropy of the universe. If Einstein’s dream conceived becoming as an obstacle for physics and the arrow of time (symbol of the one-directional nature of time that found no “abode” in the physics of the early twentieth century) as an illusion to be overcome, today becoming would seem to irrupt precisely where this dream had found its most evident expression, that is to say, in the symmetry established by general relativity between matter and space-time. The initial instability, in agreement with Prigogine, makes of the universe the product of a breakage of symmetry between space-time, on the one hand, and matter, on the other, placing moreover the birth of the material universe under the sign of a radical irreversibility: the laceration of the uniform fabric of space-time from which matter and entropy are simultaneously and constantly generated. Starting from some studies done mainly at the level of the thermodynamics of nonequilibrium and in virtue of some very recent experiments of particle physics that would show the existence of the arrow of time,1 the radical conceptual transformation concerning temporal irreversibility has gradually penetrated into almost every level of physics, to …
souls represented by freedom and limitation. Its inventive force is manifested in the creation of new languages, in particular formal and symbolic languages, which allow us to introduce distinctions inaccessible to natural language. It is not a question, in other words, of denying the physics of eternity, but of responding to the challenge that its success has constituted. From Galileo to our days, physics has been guided by an ideal of perfection—Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason— whose reverberations have influenced decisively, especially in the last century, all the sciences, including logic, epistemology, and the cognitive sciences. The reversible equality between cause and effect has constituted an almost invisible constraint that has led to Galilean physics, quantum mechanics, and the theory of relativity, giving birth moreover at the epistemological level to the linear approach or to reversibility inspired by more or less refined forms of determinism and reductionism. Just as Kepler renewed the cognitive ideal of astronomy, breaking the circle that had lead from Ptolemy to Copernicus, Prigogine, and others scholars have contributed to fracturing the circle of sufficient reason, creating a new mathematical language capable of making intelligible the irreversible processes and events that traditional physics had limited itself to saving through phenomenological approximations. Hence the possibility to identify the time of complexity as the complexity of time: time once again becomes the undisputed protagonist of the phenomena—and therefore of the scientific analysis—of observable dynamics and of those dynamics not yet subject to a completed measurability. A time that sheds light on the argument of complexity, today the starting point for theoreticians of nonlinearity and for the search for a knowledge that, in the past, proved to often simplified an ignored. As difficult and risky it is to consider complexity theory a theory, it highlights first of all the intrinsic irreve …
Therefore, in light of all this, according to the nonlinear approach proper to the complexity theory envisaged by Prigogine, like Augustine, we do not know what time is, but it proves possible to trace back the laws of motion to integral definition
The chapter presented in this section retraces, albeit in a very general fashion, the interwoven threads of the two main approaches that animate the contemporary epistemological and scientific debate with particular reference to the concept of time, that is to say, the one of linearity (the circle of sufficient reason common to classical, relativistic, and quantum physics) and the other one of nonlinearity (the physics of dissipative processes and complexity theory), illustrated in these first pages through the articulated comparison between Einstein’s theory of relativity and Prigogine’s theory of dissipative entropy-producing processes. Some issues crop up again and again as dominant themes in lively contraposition like; take, for example, the issues of instability and the event (temporal irreversibility) in opposition to the circle of sufficient reason (temporal reversibility), which presupposes the possibility of defining the cause and effect, between which a law of evolution would establish a reversible equivalence. Instability resists this ideal, opening a new field of problems in which the event, that is, the historicity of evolutive processes, plays a central role. In all the contexts addressed here not only by physics and epistemology, but also by logic, psychology and linguistics (though under different forms), one finds this dialectical process of generatively juxtaposing complementary souls, between the event (time) which creates a difference between the past and the future and sufficient reason (eternity) which attempts to define them as equivalents. According to the positions sustained by the various authors, in virtue of this complex dynamic regarding the comparison between symmetry and asymmetry, the possibility emerges of overcoming the opposition between the object subjected to the categories of sufficient reason and the subject which, by definition, should elude them. Finally, there are interesting attempts at integrating Parmenides’ being, eternally identical to itself …
Nicola Grana analyzes the concept of time in Prigogine, maintaining as a theoretical horizon of reference the fundamental idea that is the basis for the works of the Brussels school, according to which irreversibility would prove closely linked to the notion of dynamic instability. Grana carries out his analysis by illustrating the cosmological model proposed by Prigogine of a universe that exhibits both an age (an origin) and an arrow of time. In this perspective, the symmetry of the relations that Einsteinian cosmology established between space-time and matter, inherited from the Newtonian theory of masses in gravitational interaction, is broken: matter is distinguished from space-time by its bearing the entropy of the universe. Its existence is no longer a given, as the standard model presupposes, but is rather the product of an irreversible process of creation.
1 Einstein and Prigogine Theories Atlas El Map
today we know, thanks to the important theoretical contributions offered by Prigogine and others scholars at the level of the science of dissipative processes that produce entropy (the physics of dissipative systems) and of the science of complexity, that such a unity does not mean equivalence.
In the perspective offered by Prigogine since the late 1970s, the creation of entropy-bearing matter cannot be traced back to a reversible phenomenon. In this perspective, it is the very production of entropy that
The initial instability, in agreement with Prigogine, makes of the universe the product of a breakage of symmetry between space-time, on the one hand, and matter, on the other, placing moreover the birth of the material universe under the sign of a radical irreversibility.
Time in Einstein and Prigogine Theories EL map Flavia Santoianni
3 Guillaume, Einstein, Reichenbach, and Prigogine Atlas El Map
Ilya Prigogine has made of the concept of time the main task of his scientific and philosophical research. We must accept what Stephen Hawking himself said about the beginning and the end of time, in physic-cosmological meaning
Time in Guillaume, Einstein, Reichenbach, and Prigogine EL map Flavia Santoianni
Abstract What is time? What is its beginning, if we may speak of a beginning? All these questions are not stimulated by a crypto-metaphysical need, but by the epistemological approach itself. It is enough here to think of Ilya Prigogine, who has made of the concept of time the main task of his scientific and philosophical research. In this horizon, we must accept what Stephen Hawking himself said about the beginning and the end of time, in physic-cosmological meaning, as we can accept the meaning of experienced time, which stands in the evolution of our history, which begins with us, coincides with the origin of our biological time, or of our biological times, to end with the end of our biological history on a macroscopic scale. Our evolutionary history is, of course, underlined by experienced time, the charioteer of our changes, but in a dialectical relation with chronological, chronometric, chronosophic times, in a relation of one among many, which produces states of suffering. But it does not make this evolutionary history less interesting. So, at the end of our journey, at least the consciousness of being “inhabitants” of time and bearers of change appears, and this occurs whether we have behind us big cataclysms or thermic Death.
Let us begin stressing the fact that according to Prigogine time leads us to man and not vice versa; man be not the creator of time. This position is totally different from what the physicist John Archibald Wheeler thinks: for him, man, the observer, his consciousness, creates time, which would not be there nor exists in a world without men and their consciousness. On the other hand, Ilya Prigogine thinks of man as being part of this flow of irreversibility which is one of the essential elements, consubstantial to the universe (Prigogine 1988: 21) and finds its essential role along the path followed by Henri Bergson. Time is a subject of science just because it has a fundamental and main role in an evolutional universe, irreversible, and complex, in which reversibility and simplicity are just particular cases. Man himself comes from time: time, if it was created by man, would be a screen between nature and man himself. This idea of time prior-to-man belongs to a vision of continuous evolution of the universe, where gravitation and thermodynamics are in continuous dialectic. According to this point of view, the future of our universe itself is not, up to now, determined, just as human life and society are not. The real message, according to Prigogine, of the second principle of thermodynamics is the impossibility to predict the future, which is open, whether referring to the little systems of physics, or to the totality of the universe of which we are a part. If we observe our universe, we can see that other than mechanical time, there is irreversibility, which implies interior time, chemical time. The difference between a chemical reaction and life is that in the first case, when we stop feeding it, its interior time dies, while for life, interior time continues and flows from one generation to another, from one species to another, becoming more and more complex (Prigogine 1988: 24).
To read the history of our universe as a history of an autonomous time, or of an increasing autonomy of time is one of the interesting temptations of contemporary (Prigogine 1988: 24) science. This temptation has widely interested Prigogine, who asked himself radical and important—if not fundamental—questions, such as: if the universe is mechanical and/or thermodynamic, what was there before? Were there the reversible laws of mechanics, of quantum theory, of relativity or the direction of time? Did Aristotle have a good insight by pointing out the before and the after, or was he wrong? One can find an answer to these problems in Prigogine studies on thermodynamic systems far from equilibrium, cases in which a system, far from being isolated, undergoes strong conditioning from outside (energetic flows or
reactive substances) (Prigogine 1988: 26). And we can understand the world around us just by paying attention to these properties. Dissipative structures involve this property of sensitiveness and coherent movements, possibilities of multiple states, and so of historicity of the «choices» adopted by the systems (Prigogine 1988: 26), properties studied by nonlinear physics-mathematics.
If we assume that in conditions of equilibrium each molecule sees what there is around it, while in nonequilibrium conditions, for example, in the case of chemical watches or of the big hydrodynamic flows, it is necessary for there to be some signals go across the entire system, and that material elements can see further than their immediate vicinity: matter should become sensible (Prigogine 1988: 26). Life itself is an example of this situation: in fact it should have incorporated physical properties such as gravitation, electromagnetic fields, light, weather, and so on, acquiring the flexibility proper to a substance far from equilibrium.
This flexibility implies many possible properties, many possible states, which are the different dissipative structures accessible (Prigogine 1988: 27). Equations are nonlinear, while they become linear in proximity to equilibrium where there is just one solution: the opposite of the precedent case. But all this implies other difficulties such as the ones relative to attractors,2 to sensitiveness to the initial conditions, to the deterministic case, and so on. Life is the kingdom of the nonlinear, life is the kingdom of the autonomy of time, it is the kingdom of the multiplicity of structures (Prigogine 1988: 28), but all this is better hidden in the un-alive universe, where there are some structures, there is the nonlinear, and thus, the time of evolution becomes longer. Life gives us help to see these things, such as the birth and the death of structures, in a short time, on a reductive temporal scale. But life is time inscribed in substance, as it is for a work of art. It is a symmetry broken as a polymer, as a DNA. But does time have a beginning? How has it appeared in the universe? These are the questions Prigogine poses for himself and this is his singular answer:
is the result of an instability succeeded to a precedent situation; so the universe would be the result of a phase change on a big choice3 (Prigogine 1988: 39).
… already in floating empty space time preexisted at the potential state (Prigogine 1988: 63)
and, Prigogine adds, it is a time which is not our historical, chronological time, it is neither eternity nor the eternal return. Effectively, it is no longer just irreversibility and evolution but is a potential time, a time which is <<always already here>>, in a latent state, which just needs a floating phenomenon to become real. In this meaning time was not born with our universe: time precedes existence, and can make other universes exist (Prigogine 1988: 64). But a definition of time, of this pre-existent time is not yet given us, we do not have the language for it, we are still searching for the language that will clarify this point for us, giving us more and richer words.
Furthermore time, according to Prigogine, has a very important role: a creative one. In each phenomenon we observe we can see the creative role of an irreversible phenomenon, the creative role of time (Prigogine 1988: 79). To the classic conception that considers that irreversibility implies entropy, which on the one hand implies probability, precisely because we do not know the exact trajectories,4 Prigogine opposes the second principle of thermodynamics as a message regarding the structure of the universe.
He stresses the point that our universe at its beginning was in a state of equilibrium. It is precisely the existence of substance and not of anti-substance that is the proof of the breakage of symmetry (Prigogine 1988: 80), (while in the laboratory we are able to produce the same quantity of substance and anti-substance). And he adds, always keeping a positive reading of the second principle, that
the evolution of the universe was not in the direction of degradation but in the direction of an increase in complexity, with structures which appear progressively at each level, from the stars and the galaxies to the biological systems (Prigogine 1988: 80).
3Quotations from Prigogine (1988) translated by the Author.
4In instable dynamic systems the concept of trajectory has no meaning. In fact “two points, as narrow as you want, will go exponentially far from each other, according to the number called <<Ljapuno’s exponent>>. Instability destroys the character of the trajectory and modifies our concept of space-time” (Prigogine 1988: 79). Already Einstein married the concept of time with matter, now we must marry the space-time with irreversibility, that is, “that irreversibility expresses also a structure of space-time” (Prigogine 1988: 79).
the reality of the universe is more complex: on long terms and on a cosmological level gravitation and entropy are implied, and the game between the two is far from being cleared up (Prigogine 1988: 81).
The teaching of the second principle is that this becoming stays open, tied as it is to always new processes of the transformation and increasing of complexity (Prigogine 1988: 81).
It is a process that matches particular conditions5 (Prigogine and Stengers 1989: 145)
irreversibility may not be an added property, which underlines a difference between the effective evolution of our universe and the ideal of an adiabatic evolution, as it’s the case of the pattern of inflation. Instead, it may be the essential expression of the genesis of our universe (Prigogine and Stengers: 153)
it may not be energy, but entropy to make the difference between Minkowski’s simple space-time empty universe and our material universe (Prigogine and Stengers 1989: 153).
the geometrical, space-temporal universe corresponds to a coherent state which is going to be destroyed by entropic creation of substance (Prigogine and Stengers 1989: 153).
5Quotations from Prigogine and Stengers (1989) translated by the Author.
According to Prigogine, thermic death is at the origin, it is behind us, it is part of the history of our past at the moment when the space-temporal structure of our empty universe broke down, and when, breaking the smooth «space–temporal fabric», substance appeared, and with it, entropy (Prigogine and Stengers 1989: 153). This event for Prigogine corresponds to the instability of an emptiness of a quantum theory, which is the contrary of nothing, containing potentially all possible particles, and so corresponds to an empty original space. All this denies the hypothesis of the birth of universe as a singular event, a hypothesis which implies the creation of spatio-temporal bending. The creatures of the primordial universe must be essentially dissipative, characterized by a very high entropy (Prigogine and Stengers 1989: 156).
The floating vacuum of quantum theory can cause the instability of Minkowski’s (Prigogine and Stengers 1989: 156) (empty) universe and the widening of a fluctuation would break Minkowski’s space-time, giving birth to our universe by an irreversible production of particles having mass and the bending of space-time (Prigogine and Stengers: 157). This pattern is similar to the processes of nucleation, of the crystallization of a liquid, of its superfusion (with a temperature less than that of crystallization), so this pattern implies that our universe should undergo an inflationary phase, and renders useless the assumption of a cosmological constant so pregnant with difficulty.
The instability which creates Substance replaces the initial singularity, or big bang, with its enormous problems, and may explain the passing from an empty universe (of quantum theory) to a universe in exponential expansion crowded by mini black holes, with a life lasting 10 s. This is the duration of the birth of our universe, in which there may be produced almost the whole totality of its entropy (Prigogine and Stengers 1989: 151). With the vaporization of black holes, it is possible that the evolution of the adiabatic type described by the standard pattern (Prigogine and Stengers 1989: 158), could begin, while at the death of black holes that generate substance and radiation, the exponential expansion becomes an adiabatic expansion, that of the standard pattern, which still continues nowadays (Prigogine and Stengers 1989: 158). The fundamental conclusion that Prigogine underlines is that the big bang is instable in its structure (Prigogine and Stengers 1989: 205–211) and that the project of this pattern matches the description of our actual universe.
The calculations of entropy of the black holes created during the 10 s of the coming to birth of our universe allows, beginning from the value of the three universal constants, a correct evaluation of the data that characterize the thermodynamic structure of our actual universe: the entropy (measured with the number of the photons of the universe) and, mostly, the relation between the number of particles with a mass, and that of the photons which constitute this universe (Prigogine and Stengers 1989: 159). So why is the characteristic of the birth of substance irreversible, beginning from space-time? In the Prigoginian thesis, the
creation of our universe is followed by a decrease of gravitational energy. If we assume that the vacuum of quantum theory is an energetic and basic state of non-value, the creation of our material universe then gives a negative value to that state, which corresponds to the bending of space-time that is given as a consequence (Prigogine and Stengers 1989: 159). This implies that our universe is in expansion, because the transferring of energy is in one direction (gravitational energy towards material energy), while the opposite is impossible. I want to stress the point here that the expansion and creation of substance imply each other, but the period of the expansion of creation of our universe is distinguished from the expansion without creation: see the cosmological equations of Friedmann-Lemaitré.
According to Prigogine the original vacuum of quantum theory implies a latent irreversible time, presupposed by this floating vacuum (Prigogine and Stengers 1989: 160). In fact, the conditions of nonequilibrium do not create the arrow of time, but allow its manifestation at a macroscopic level, so that the arrow of time of our universe is not created, but actualized by the fluctuation that gives birth to this universe. That is, time precedes existence.
According to this point of view, we may exclude the birth of our universe as a singularity and thus as a unique event, but we may not exclude the above-mentioned conditions of nonequilibrium from re-proposing themselves. This may imply an end of our universe, but Prigogine affirms that now there is no reason to make such a hypothesis; thermic death is our past, but we cannot exclude a reproduction of the initial conditions of the floating vacuum of quantum theory, nor can we exclude a death of our universe which could lead to a new floating empty vacuum, from which, once again having the conditions of nonequilibrium, a new universe would arise. Finally, our universe is a possible one, among many possible universes. But have these possible universes already been or must they come to be in respect to latent time or to our time or to time of the possible? Of course they must be in respect to latent time. But since it is a different possibility with respect the realized one, the actualized one, the measure of time cannot be established with respect to possible time, because we cannot grasp it in any way, we know nothing of a possible universe different or similar to ours. The only relation we can find is that with our time, but this is not the original one because it is just one particular and precise actualization of it. It is the time of the birth of our universe and cannot be considered as a reference.
from a latent state, which pretends to be more than a simple potentiality, because it is a floating vacuum, to another state of evolution 10-, which correspond to the duration of the birth of our universe, up to the exponential growth of entropy, followed by the adiabatic phase (with constant entropy)? So we should speak of duration, of change instead of absolute time, that should precede every existence and every thought, and this would be very near to what we call eternity. In change, in duration, states of local conflict are possible and tolerable, as it seems to emerge from Prigogine’s pattern, which is of course much more reliable than others for its unitary and problem-solving vision, which other patterns lack.6 We must not stop at the thresholds of entropic explosions and presuppose absolute time, which does not match the capabilities of our language and our imagination (Prigogine and Stengers 1989: 163). Should we then give up thinking of its origin, the origin of absolute time or eternity? This presupposes the time of our universe, or better said, the times of our universe, as they were captured by different and various correlative approaches. To take change instead of a temporal horizon, inherent in that floating vacuum of quantum theory, the thresholds where to stop seem to fall and change seems to bring things totally into harmony with Prigogine’s pattern that we have analyzed before.
In this horizon, we must accept what Stephen Hawking (Hawking 1988)7 himself said about the beginning and the end of time, in physic-cosmological meaning, as we can accept the meaning of experienced time, which stands in the evolution of our history, which begins with us, coincides with the origin of our biological time, or of our biological times, to end with the end of our biological history on a macroscopic scale. Our evolutionary history is, of course, underlined by experienced time, the charioteer of our changes, but in a dialectical relation with chronological, chronometric, chronosophic times, in a relation of one among many, which produces states of suffering. But it does not make this evolutionary history less interesting. So, at the end of our journey, at least the consciousness of being “inhabitants” of time and bearers of change appears, and this occurs whether we have behind us big cataclysms (Eliade 1963) or thermic Death (Prigogine 1988).
8In this work Masullo carries out a severe philosophical analysis of the Prigoginian concept of irreversibility, suitably distinguishing the evolutionary irreversibility of Prigogine from the one of the foregoing thermodynamics.
Peitgen, H., & Richter, P. (1986). The beauty offractals. New York: Springer-Verlag. Prigogine, I. (1988). La nascita del tempo. (B. Pedretti, Trans.). Roma-Napoli: Theoria. Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1989). Tra il tempo e l’eternità. (C. Tatasciore, Trans.). Torino:
Commentary: Einstein, Prigogine, Barbour, and Their Philosophical Refractions
Nicola Grana analyzes the concept of time in Prigogine, keeping as theoretical reference the main idea supporting the work of the Brussels school, according to which irreversibility is closely linked to the notion of dynamic instability. In predicting the behavior of instable systems, in fact, it is not our lack of knowledge that is at play, but rather the dynamic nature of the system. Therefore, it is dynamic instability that is at the origin of the notion of probability, and not vice versa. To clarify the meaning of this affirmation, it is sufficient to recall how, for Prigogine, subjecting a particular kind of system to a given constraint, we may obtain as a result an increase in entropy correlated, at the same time, to the delineation of a phenomenon of order.
In this perspective, Grana carries out his analysis by illustrating the cosmological model, proposed by Prigogine, of a universe that demonstrates at the same time an age (an origin) and an arrow of time. According to this viewpoint, the symmetry of the relations that Einsteinian cosmology established between space–time and matter, inherited from the Newtonian theory of masses in gravitational interaction, is broken: matter is distinguished by space–time by the fact that it is a bearer of the entropy of the universe. Its existence is no longer a given, as the standard model presupposes, but is rather the product of an irreversible process of creation. The initial singularity linked to the Big Bang is substituted thus by the instability of a primordial empty universe in which space–time would be curved, radiating matter. The meaning of irreversibility thus undergoes a radical change, since irreversibility should no longer be linked to an evolution that leads inexorably toward an inert state of the universe (thermic death), but to its birth or perhaps to an eternal succession of universes that are born everywhere and that head toward the infinite.
As Grana correctly points out, for Prigogine time precedes existence, since the conception of the original quantum void he envisages implies, per se, a latent irreversible time presupposed by the fluctuations of this void. This is similar to the situation regarding the states of equilibrium where the conditions of nonequilibrium do not create the arrow of time of our universe, but allow it (always present in the dynamic of the post collisional correlations) to manifest itself at the macroscopic level. In the same way, the arrow of time of our universe is not created, but actualized by the fluctuations that favor its deployment. In other words, for Prigogine it is not possible to think of the origin of time, but only of the “entropic