Time, irreversibility and structure

Ilya Prigogine

pp. 561-593

in: Jagdish Mehra (ed), The physicist's conception of nature, Berlin, Springer, 1973

Abstract

The legacy of Newtonian mechanics is a concept of a world in which time is essentially a parameter associated with motion ¹. As early as 1796, Lagrange called mechanics a four-dimensional geometry². The two great revolutions we have witnessed in physics during this century, relativity and quantum mechanics, have kept unmodified this character of Newton's world model.