The existence of bifurcations at wh

The existence of bifurcations at which the system may take several different paths implies that indeterminacy is another characteristic of Prigogine's theory. At the bifurcation point the system can "choose"-the term is used metaphorically-from among sev­ eral possible paths, or states. Which path it will take will depend on the system's history and on various external conditions and can never be predicted. There is an irreducible random element at each bifurcation point.This indeterminacy at bifurcation points is one of two kinds of unpredictability in the theory of dissipative structures. The other kind, which is also present in chaos theory, is due to the highly nonlinear nature of the equations and exists even when there are no bifurcations. Because of repeated feedback loops-or, mathe­ matically, repeated iterations-the tiniest error in the calculations, caused by the practical need to round off figures at some decimal point, will inevitably add up to sufficient uncertainty to make predictions impossible.9The indeterminacy at the bifurcation points and the "chaos­ type" unpredictability due to repeated iterations both imply that the behavior of a dissipative structure can be predicted only over a short time span. After that, the system's trajectory eludes us. Thus Prigogine's theory, like quantum theory and chaos theory, re­ minds us once more that scientific knowledge offers but "a limited window on the universe.'" 0