Physics is often presented using systems whose dynamics are time-reversible (like billiard ball collisions - a film of these collisions is consistent with the laws governing them even when played in reverse), with thermodynamics and its irreversible processes tacked on as an afterthought. This point of view has led a number of popularizers of physics (like Stephen Hawking) to state that the universe is deterministic, time is effectively no different from another spatial dimension, and our perception of the passage of the time is just an illusion.

Ilya Prigogine makes a compelling (but highly technical) case that, in fact, time irreversibility is a necessary part of even a rudimentary description of the universe. Unfortunately, although The End of Certainty is packaged like a popular science book, it makes heavy use of grad-school-level mathematical descriptions of classical mechanics - and the writing is not fantastic. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who doesn't have a decent physics background, but if the words "Hilbert space" and "Liouville operator" mean anything to you, it's worth hearing Ilya Prigogine's argument through.

Just because we've made the most progress in understanding equilibrium processes and linear systems, we must not forgot that we bask in the massive energy flow of a star, far from equilibrium, and all of our attempts to understand nature happen in the thermodynamic limit.