Reddit reviews The End of Certainty

Since you've apparently read Greene, you should move to Prigogine. We've got whole new ways to cook with eggs and entropy now.

The link is his most accessible book, written 20 or so years after his Nobel in Chemistry. But if you've worked with quantum mechanics and are already familiar with quantum operators and associated notation/conventions, From Being to Becoming is a really accessible formal intro, written for an academic audience but necessarily academics in his field.

In the context of nonequilibrium thermodynamics, pattern formation in complex systems and order at the edge of chaos, several introductory/intermediate books come to mind, in particular from the Brussels' school. For a start one could go with

Prigogine - The End of Certainty

Nicolis, Prigogine - Exploring Complexity

Kauffman - The Origins of Order

For something directly from one of the giant of chaos theory, maybe one could go with

Lorenz - The Essence of Chaos

This was covered in a great book 12 years ago.

>this is an interesting proof

I came across it in something by Prigogine, probably The End of Certainty, he didn't make a fuss about it, seemingly considering it to be obvious. But in the SEP Hoefer wrote "it then seems a mere curious fact that it is equally true that the state of the world now determines everything that happened in the past", which suggests that he wasn't aware of this argument.

>why is a determined world fully reversable?

It follows from the usual definitions; a world is determined if and only if it has, at all times, a definite state, that can, in principle, be exactly and globally described, there are laws of nature that are the same at all times and in all places, and given the state of the world at any time, the state of the world at all other times is exactly and globally entailed by the given state and the laws. See this page too.

>why does life require irreversibility?

Life requires chemical processes that produce stable structures, cell walls, for example, such reactions are all irreversible.

On the face of it, the premises are pretty much uncontroversial, so it would seem that the determinist must reject the inference of 3 from 1 and 2. Perhaps they would argue that 1 is a statement of metaphysics but 2 is a statement of science, so 2 can be scientifically true but metaphysically false.