unfortunately this does not hold for mainstream "science" nowadays... but there is hope in Stellar Metamorphosis, where humans, life etc. are fully embedded in the nature of astrons.
@@danielarcher369 mainstream science or I guess Western corporate profiteering controlled science *coughs* is complete fraud so I'm actually glad it doesn't agree with Ilya. the Michael shermer and Sam Harris types are total fraud. in fact the very moment he mentions Feynman i was relieved by that considering that's Lawrence Krauss' favorite scientist and carl Sagan also loved Feynman. so with those verified dots connected no need to even respond. just open your ego and perception up a bit. and again this is proven science not conspiracy theories.
Prigogine was bold, yet elegant, with his thinking. A man who seeks the way of the roots which tie living systems to nature in an inextricable harmony.
Ilya Prigogine died on 28 May in Brussels, after a long illness. Born in Moscow, he emigrated at an early age, as his family sought to escape the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution. The family arrived first in Germany, then moved to Belgium - the country that became Prigogine's true homeland. He studied chemistry and physics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and obtained his PhD in 1939 under the tutelage of Théophile De Donder, a remarkable professor, who pioneered the development of modern physics in Belgium. Extending and deepening De Donder's work, Prigogine himself became a pioneer of the thermodynamics of irreversible processes. Classical thermodynamics is the science of equilibrium: the concept of variation with time was viewed with suspicion; dissipative phenomena, such as friction, were considered a nuisance. Prigogine attacked the problem head-on, by introducing a quantitative concept of irreversibility. He produced a sound derivation of transport processes, relating the fluxes of energy and matter to the thermodynamic forces (such as gradients of temperature or density, or electric fields) that cause them. Irreversibility and entropy became the main themes of his subsequent work. The next step was to consolidate these macroscopic notions by addressing their molecular basis. This subject had remained in the shadows since the last years of the nineteenth century with Ludwig Boltzmann's work on the kinetic theory of gases and a definition of entropy at the microscopic level. (It was even considered to be 'cursed' - Boltzmann committed suicide in 1906.) How could the irreversibility of real processes at the macroscopic scale be reconciled with the perfect time-reversibility of the (classical or quantum) law of motion for molecules? In the 1960s, surrounded by a small group of enthusiastic co-workers, Prigogine began to make crucial progress on this point, developing the first form of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics. (Another approach, developed independently by Nikolai Bogolyubov in the Soviet Union, turned out to be equivalent to Prigogine's.) As well as being quite a general formulation of the theory, there were other fruits of this endeavour, for it could be applied to a variety of systems, from gases and solids to plasmas. Pushing the study further, to systems that are far from equilibrium, Prigogine and his increasingly numerous co-workers uncovered an extraordinary phenomenon. When the distance from equilibrium (measured by some appropriate parameter) reaches a certain threshold, the trajectory of a system meets a fork, or bifurcation. The system may then leave the trajectory along which it has evolved from equilibrium, and jump to a totally different one. If the system is pushed even further, more bifurcations may appear, and when the system is very far from equilibrium, it may behave completely chaotically (as, for example, the regular flow of a liquid may become turbulent). But, alternatively and unexpectedly, the system might reach a new, ordered state - what Prigogine called a 'dissipative structure'. Such states are particularly striking in systems in which chemical reactions proceed alongside the effects of diffusion or external forces: ordered structures of different chemical composition appear, which may even propagate as 'chemical waves'. Two ingredients are vital if this is to occur: the 'open' character of the system (meaning that it can exchange matter and energy with the external world), and the nonlinear character of the equations governing the evolution of the system. These conditions arise, in particular, in living systems. Prigogine had thus created an important link between physics, chemistry and biology (even extending it to sociology and economics). His achievement was crowned with the award of the 1977 Nobel prize for chemistry - the pinnacle of a long list of awards, prizes and honorary degrees. By the 1990s, Prigogine was again thinking about physics at the microscopic level. Substantial progress had been made by mathematicians and physicists in the study of nonlinear dynamical systems, and one of the most important features to be uncovered was the intrinsic dynamical instability of most 'non-integrable' systems (even very simple ones). As a result, Prigogine introduced the crucial idea that the usual method of defining the state of a system by specifying exactly the positions and momenta of all of its components (that is, a point in 'phase space') is not realistic, because a close, neighbouring state may evolve in a completely different way. Rather, the state should be described by an ensemble - a cluster of identical systems differing in their initial conditions. The latter may (but does not have to) be concentrated around a single point in phase space. The description of the system's evolution thus becomes statistical. In this way, the solutions of the equations are regularized (divergences are suppressed), and irreversibility appears as a welcome bonus in the theory. Like his mentor De Donder before him, Prigogine was also a remarkable professor. In the United States, he was the founder and director of the Center for Statistical Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin (later renamed the Ilya Prigogine Center for Studies in Statistical Mechanics and Complex Systems); in 1959 he was made director of the International Solvay Institutes for Physics and Chemistry in Brussels. His lectures were fascinating for students, as he preferred to leave out tedious details and instead include parenthetical perspectives on art, music and philosophy. His books for a general audience, such as La Nouvelle Alliance (with I. Stengers), From Being to Becoming and his last work, La Fin des Certitudes, were bestsellers around the world. He was a true humanist, in the widest meaning of the word, and attracted numerous disciples. His death closes an important chapter in the history of science. Nature, vol. 424, page30 (2003)
We need to be listening much more carefully to this guy, his thinking needs to be reignited at the forefront of thinking in science and philosophy today...
i find it interesting the paradox of time that it only exists by observation. that is the statistical probability of a universe in which time exists is much more probable once time has brought forth its own sense of reality. yey
Actually not MikeforJesus. I refer strictly to his interpretation of statistical mechanics on which he bases partly his metaphysical thoughts. Equations in physics are time-reversable at the microscopic level. Prigogine and collaborators found non-time reversible solutions to the so-called Liouville equation for the phase space density. But all of that is highly contested in physics. For most physicists, the arrow of time is reversible microscopically. Prigogine maitains that it can't be!
@lmsor1 It is not difficult for scientists to accept the irreversible nature of time. Thermodynamics and statistical dynamics assume de facto the existence of irreversible processes and thus give an arrow to time. What makes Prygogine controversial is his attempts to concoct theories in which time appears in an irreversible way at the microscopic level. It is not the generally accepted reason for thermodynamic irreversibility.
he poses good question's and several philosophers have made a remarkable writings about topics he adresses. People like Lacan, Freud, Nietzsche, and afkors Hegel, and many others...
«Если живые системы считаются далекими от равновесия?» Часто исследователи, изучающие происхождение жизни, ее эволюцию и старение живых существ, считают живые системы и организмы объектами, которые предположительно далеки от равновесия. Однако в большинстве случаев это не указано, какое равновесие задействовано: химическое или супрамолекулярное равновесие внутри живого объекта (организма) или равновесие между этим объектом и окружающей средой? Например, идея отсутствия равновесия использовалась Ирисом Пригожиным, который, кажется, для меня явно не оговаривалось, какое именно равновесие связано. Такая неопределенность привела к появлению «упрощенной и размытой» теории живых «диссипативных структур, далеких от равновесия». Однако эта теория стала самой модной в науках о жизни во второй половине прошлого века. Кроме того, теория ИК Пригожина систем, далеких от равновесия, основана на идее определенного «общего» производства энтропии , функция, не имеющая полного дифференциала. Эту функцию следует рассматривать как кинетическую функцию, которая, кроме того, не может быть измерена или рассчитана. Таким образом, вряд ли можно эффективно обсудить указанную теорию, исходные положения которой строго не определены. В связи с этим мне кажется, что внимание читателя следует обратить на то, что исследователи, изучающие химические и супрамолекулярные превращения в открытых лабораторных сосудах или проточных реакторах, часто склонны проводить эти процессы в условиях, близких к равновесным (квазиравновесным), используя равновесие термодинамические методы. Получение правильных кристаллов и хроматографическое разделение веществ также осуществляются в почти равновесных условиях. С уважением, Георгий Гладышев
As a physicist I must disagree with the above posts. He was not a bad man (and I had the honour of meeting him once) and did great work originally in non-equilibrium thermodynamics, but all his later pronouncements are rejected by the vast majority of physicists. He is popular amongst the general public because he engaged in philosophical extrapolation; it is not a criticism but a statement of his interest and personality.
Percentage: I would not know exactly. But when I was at the University of Maryland, they had a huge group on Chaos and the like. (York, Ott, Dorfman, Zwanzig...) You could not find anyone having anything good to say about Prigogine. Of course it was a bit unfair but it shows how he became somewhat of a bizarre character as far as the main stream was concerned. But who knows where will end up with Super Strings and multidimensional theories... time itself will be re-examined...
The comments on this page are discouraging.... As a scientist who had the pleasure to meet Prof. Prigogine in Japan prior to his death, I do not tie his philosophical ideas with his scientific ones. By all accounts, he is wrong scientifically. In fact he is border krackpot with all due respect. But that does not mean that his ideas about the world are all crap. Religion, to name one thing, is not derivable from science....
