Prigogine, Ilya, and Erwin N. Hiebert. “From being to becoming: Time and complexity in the physical sciences.” Physics Today 35, no. 1 (1982): 69.
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This book is about time. I would like to have named it Time, the Forgotten Dimension, although such a title might surprise some readers. Is not time incorporated from the start in dynamics, in the study of motion? Is not time the very point of concern of the special theory of relativity ? This is certainly true. However, in the dynamical description, be it classical or quantum, time enters only in a quite restricted way, in the sense that these equations are invariant with respect to time inversion, f -» — f. Although a specific type of interaction, the so-called superweak interaction, seems to violate this time symmetry, the violation plays no role in the problems that are the subject of this book. As early as 1754, d’Alembert noted that time appears in dynamics as a mere “geometrical parameter” (d’Alembert 1754). And Lagrange, more than a hundred years before the work of Einstein and Minkowski, went so far as to call dynamics a four-dimensional geometry (Lagrange 1796). In this view, future and past play the same role. The world lines, the trajectories, followed by the atoms or particles that make up our universe can be traced toward the future or toward the past. This static view of the world is rooted in the origin of Western science (Sambursky 1963). The Milesian school, of which Thales was one of the most illustrious proponents, introduced the idea of a primordial matter closely related to the concept of conservation of matter.