“We have seen that the formation and maintenance of self-organizing systems are compatible with the laws of physical chemistry.”

—  Ilya Prigogine

Part 2; Cited in: Evgenii Rudnyi (2013).
Thermodynamics of Evolution (1972)

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Ilya Prigogine photo
Ilya Prigogine17
physical chemist 1917–2003

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“To those who have any intimate acquaintance with the laws of chemistry and physics the suggestion that the spiritual world could be ruled by laws of allied character is as preposterous as the suggestion that a nation could be ruled by laws like the laws of grammar.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Science and the Unseen World (1929)
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“The problem of time in physics and chemistry is closely related to the formulation of the second law of thermodynamics. Therefore another possible title of this lecture could have been: “the macroscopic and microscopic aspects of the second law of thermodynamics””

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“The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed the breakdown of the mechanistic theory even within physics, the science where it was the most successful… Relativity took over in field physics, and the science of quantum theory in microphysics… In view of parallel developments in physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, and economics, many branches of the contemporary sciences became… ‘sciences of organized complexity’ — that is, systems sciences.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: The systems view of the world (1996), p. 8 as cited in: Martha C. Beck (2013) &quot;Contemporary Systems Sciences, Implications for the Nature and Value of Religion, the Five Principles of Pancasila, and the Five Pillars of Islam,&quot; Dialogue and Universalism-E Volume 4, Number 1/2013. p. 3 ( online http://www.emporia.edu/~cbrown/dnue/documents/vol04.no01.2013/Vol04.01.Beck.pdf).

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“It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.”

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