Introduction

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The first scientific picture of the world was built up as early as more than 300 years ago by Sir Isaac Newton. On its first encounter with this picture in the school the youth of nowadays regard it as completely natural and even as an only one possible. But the contemporaries of Newton were clear about the paradoxicallity of his conception. It held that there is an absolute Empty Space with no end or edge in which stars and planets float slowly, separated by enormous distances. Time is equally absolute, its pace depending on nothing and being uniform in all corners of the immense Universe. Force of gravity correlated all material bodies and acted at any distance with whatever big velocity with no good reason provided. The system really held much to dismay the nimble minds!

This queer Universe left no room for accidence for all what was to happen in it was rigorously pre-destinated by the law of causation. Additionally, the time featured one more amazing property. It followed from the equations of classical mechanics that nothing would change about this Universe, if the time once flew in the opposite direction.

Nevertheless, despite all these weird things, the theory proved to be exceptionally fruitful when it came to handling many practical matters. Thereupon, the formerly striking image of this Universe came itself to be seen as quite habitual and in a way even the only one that can exist.

This classical picture of the world's edifice proved to be equally conforming to humanitarian needs. Adam Smith and David Ricardo took as a basis of their economics the Newtonian idea of coupling theory with invariants, the quantities which do not vary on being employed in any sort of operation. That was how theory of cost came into being, later generalized by Karl Marx. And it was about the same time that Thomas Malthus originally applied the procedure of mathematical modeling for inquiry into the problem of population.

The crisis of mechanicbred outlook rose in the late 19 — the early 20 Centuries. The classical theory proved unable to explain neither the results of the experiment of Michelson — Morley who were repeat­edly making vain attempts to discover ether, a thin light-bearing matter, nor a mechanism regulating the emergence of X-rays opened by W. Roentgen. It took insights of Einstein's and Bohr's geniuses for a further step in theory to be advanced and clear up these troubles. The properties of the Universe revealed a sharp difference from what was known of the classical model whenever very large and very small distances were concerned. The same was true about velocities ap­proaching the velocity of light.

But while theoretical thought in the natural sciences was nimble enough to break away from the classical view, humanitarians failed to do so for quite a long time. Inquiry in the socio-cultural dynamics continued to add up to construction of the linear and mainly unidimen-sional models which were in agreement with the principles of classical determinism. By way of illustration, Lenin who proclaimed himself the only consistent follower of the Marxist idea suggested a theory of socialist revolution to be later transformed in the theoretical model of «constructing socialism in a single and separate country». Stalin brought Lenin's ideas to a practical perfection. However, life eventu­ally came to be in a complete variance with claims of a theory.

Things were not that better in the West. The liberal policy degraded into advocacy of the interests of the elite with use of democratic rhetoric. Deep economic crises which theoreticians failed to predict proceeded to hit crushingly national economies. The toughest ordeals for mankind to sustain in the 20¹ Century, the two devastating world wars, were also overlooked by the theory.

Things were tending to become different in the late 20^t Century when the West seemed to find an adequate response to the challenge of history. This response was a next coil in the spiral of scientific and technological progress. At this coil the Western civilization won a historic victory over the world system of socialism which did not stand the contest. This gave grounds to some ideologists to announce the end of historical process. Ideas of liberalism, democracy, and market econ­omy were proclaimed by them to have triumphed henceforward.

Results attained by the West are indisputably impressive. The only question is how much was paid for these achievements. For they costed a lot, when it comes to the price matter. The world is rapidly approach-

ing a global evolutional catastrophe, while theoreticians are still unable to propose effective ways to stop the world's slipping to the gulf.

Let us recall an important thing. Every time we come to believe that a situation we got into is critical, we always find it to be somehow associated with an image of human Cosmos, a picture of the world's edifice that was built up by the given moment. That was the way the matters stood in the 18¹ Century, that was how they came to be in the early 20^c Century, and that was the way they shaped in the recent period of the cold war. Way out of the crisis was never found until both a model of human Cosmos and scientific paradigm at large were added by considerable changes. And that was the only way to meet a challenge of history with appropriate response.

There is no evidence that the period of the current crisis will present here any sort of exception. It there is something special about our epoch, it is that the modern crisis is going extremely deep and wide, and in a way becoming the most troublesome and dangerous one throughout all the history of mankind. As the matter stand now, it is whether the biological species Homo sapiens survive on the Earth that is put under the question, with a second alternative being that it should become extinct, as the case was with its elder brother, the Neanderthal man, about 30, 000 or 40, 000 years ago.

The evolutional conversion goes even deeper because of the crisis in the development of science. Socio-economical disciplines failed to render a more or less adequate description to the processes of social life which become progressively complicated. The crisis in physics makes itself felt in the two aspects, experimental and ideological ones. The enormous financing which reached into dozens of billions of dollars have not led neither to mastering controlled thermonuclear reactions, nor to a significant break-through in the field of physics of high ener­gies. The first of these trends was believed to contain a solution to energetic problem on a planetary scale, while the second was thought to herald the end of formation of fundamental physical theory. None of these challenges have been met in the context of these methods.

However, a crisis in science differs from others of its kind in that it normally contains in itself an answer to the question what should be done and where should one go so that the way out of the headache must be found. The problem is that the present-day reality stands with our perception as uncommonly puzzling, intricate, and chaotic. A light remedy can be suggested that a problem be converted into a principle, with the emphasis placed upon inquiry in the properties of chaos itself.

That is the approach that has already been suggested by Ilya Prigogine. The classical picture of the world is reared by principle of determinism, denying any significance of the accidental. The laws of nature, making no exception for regularities of socio-cultural dynam­ics are positive and certain. The real Universe however has little in common with this image. It is characteristically stochastic, nonlinear, uncertain, and irreversible. It may be argued whether or not the con­cept of the arrow of time can at all enter into the evolutional-like, nonlinear Universe. Einstein is alleged to state once that «time is illusion».

In the nonlinear Universe the laws of nature and therefore socio-economic regularities express not certainty, but probability and likeli­hood It is the accidental that reserved a fundamental role in this Universe, and it is self-organization that is its most typical charac­teristic.

This view offers also important opportunities for an advance in the natural sciences. The poor state of the fundamental physical theory today is exhibited in the phenomenologism of its major equations, and also in the presence of singularity and divergence. Meanwhile, Russia boasts today great achievements in formation of a unified theory of field the task which was originally brought forward by Albert Einstein. D Sc in physics and mathematics, G. I. Shipov was first to put down a system of physical equations describing the properties of quantum vacuum and allowing for definition of the super-potential which in­cludes five main constants of interaction. The role of unified field is attributed to the torsion of space, so-called torsion field.

It is scarcely to be expected that all the new information that underlies these representations of the nonlinear Universe, including its properties and fundamental regularities, and can be employed to mode processes of socio-cultural dynamics and large-scale civilization^ transformations might ever be exposed in a single book. Still, it was the objective I was about to pursue when proceeding to work on this book. I acted in the hope that at least a minor part of these ideas be introduced to the awareness of those who will find themselves fit to go through what is being said on its pages.

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