This new order is not the sum of the parts that existed before, a result, but an ‘emergence’, come into being by the movement of an entire system. The function of chaos is in fact to break down an existing order, enabling the system to escape and realise the transformation to a new order. Prigogine discovered that the evolution did not occur in spite of, but thanks to chaos. In his famous book Order out of Chaos, published by Bantam in 1984, the Russian/Belgian Nobel laureate for chemistry Ilya Prigogine, described his discoveries with regard to dissipative structures, which dissolve to enable them to evolve to a higher order. In this sense, transformation is about the freeing of a capacity that was present, but by definition unknown.

A caterpillar cannot fly a butterfly, however, can. It is said that transformation enables the impossible to be made possible. Reagan was a fan of the fantastic juggling with time and the transformations in Back to the Future. He did this as a tribute to his own time, which he described as ‘a time of rousing wonder and heroic achievement’. In his State of the Union, in 1986, Ronald Reagan, the then president of the United States, quoted a text from the film Back to the Future, from 1985: ‘Where we’re going, we don’t need roads’.

Who are we where are we going