Bohm-prigogine centenary David lorimer

Complexity and the implicate order David Bohm – 1917-1992 Ilya Prigogine – 1917- 2004 Personal recollections and conferences

Background influences Appearance and reality Evolution and thermodynamics Henri Bergson – time, duration, novelty, creativity Alfred North Whitehead – process, organism, theories as abstraction Krishnamurti – nature of thought

The Nature of Science “Science is the attempt to understand reality. Science is a quasi-religious activity in the broadest sense of the term” – George Wald “ Science is… the interplay between the concrete details and abstract reasoning, between inductive and deductive way, between the senses that register the data and the abstract mind that orders it into meaningful patterns of relationships.” – Renee Weber

Major common themes Search for unity (also in QM) Order (Implicate-Explicate/out of Chaos) Process (also dialogue) and emergence Time (evolution, reversibility) Creativity and novelty

Key metaphors Beyond mechanism, predictability and linearity Implicate and explicate orders – ground and manifestation, unity and separation Complex dynamic systems – dissipative structures, self-organisation, bifurcation points, emergence of greater order End of certainty –stability a limiting case of instability The future is creatively open - autopoeisis