Abstract

Can physics explain the difference between past and future? The laws of physics seem to be time-symmetric. If they allow a process with one temporal orientation, they allow it in reverse. Yet many ordinary pro– cesses seem to be irreversible. Ilya Prigogine calls this the time paradox, and argues that the solution lies in chaos theory, and related methods pioneered by himself and his Brussells colleagues—a radical alternative, he thinks, to a tradition dating from Boltzmann