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complex systems, as Klein did. However, we could state to the con- trary that irreversibility is “in fact” and not “in principle”! We see the gap between reality and formalism because the latter fails to prove the irreversibility of time, which for materialist scientists is more than just a pain in the neck. It is an insurmountable obstacle. In his private correspondence even Einstein seemed to confirm the idea that time is mere confusion: “People like us, who believe in 1 : 1 ahaa wat at wos . . ae. physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” We are beginning to see that time hangs by a fine thread. Why then does it hold on at all? Ilya Pri- gogine, who challenged the idealistic conception of quantum mechan- ics that accepts the intervention of human consciousness, viewed it differently. He believed that macroscopic irreversibility is an expres- sion of the fact that the nature of the microscopic level is subject to chance. He wrote: “statistical descriptions introduce irreversible processes and increased entropy, but do not owe anything to our lack of knowledge or to any anthropocentric characteristic. These descrip- tions are the result of the very nature of dynamic processes.” In other words, in his view the microscopic level creates the illusion that there is no arrow of time. The problem is that this has not yet been demon- strated. As a believer in the Big Bang, he felt the world was created thanks to a small group of initial conditions that, in his view, rendered the statistical representation of the universe totally natural, transparent and foreseeable! But what is this multiplicity of initial conditions? How and why would these initial conditions favor the arrow of time? No one is able to answer that question. Therefore, many people feel that the Big Bang never took place, and justifiably so. “We suffer from countless contradictions, not only in classical woo 1 Se 1 4 4 formalisms (special and general relativity, quantum mechanics, quan- tum field theory, cosmology, etc.),” this French time specialist iterated. mechanics as we have seen, but also in numerous, much more advanced