Ilya Prigogine

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Ilya Prigogine
Born Ilya Romanovich Prigogine
(1917-01-25)25 January 1917
Moscow, Russian Empire
Died 28 May 2003(2003-05-28) (aged 86)
Brussels, Belgium
Nationality Belgian
Fields Chemistry
Physics
Institutions Université Libre de Bruxelles
International Solvay Institute
University of Texas, Austin
Alma mater Université Libre de Bruxelles
Doctoral advisor Théophile de Donder
Doctoral students Adi Bulsara
Radu Bălescu
Dilip Kondepudi
Zili Zhang
Known for Dissipative structures
Brusselator
Influences Ludwig Boltzmann
Alan Turing[1]
Henri Bergson[2]
Michel Serres[3]
Influenced Isabelle Stengers
Notable awards Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1977)
Spouse Hélène Jofé (m. 1945; 1 child) Maria Prokopowicz (m. 1961; 1 child)

Viscount Ilya Romanovich Prigogine (/ˈpriːɡoʊ(d)ʒiːn/; Russian: Илья́ Рома́нович Приго́жин, Ilya Romanovich Prigozhin; 25 January 1917 – 28 May 2003) was a Belgian physical chemist and Nobel Laureate noted for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility.

Biography

Prigogine was born in Moscow a few months before the Russian Revolution of 1917, into a Jewish family.[4][5][6][7][8][9] His father, Roman (Ruvim Abramovich) Prigogine, was a chemical engineer at the Imperial Moscow Technical School; his mother, Yulia Vikhman, was a pianist. Because the family was critical of the new Soviet system, they left Russia in 1921. They first went to Germany and in 1929, to Belgium, where Prigogine received Belgian nationality in 1949.

Prigogine studied chemistry at the Free University of Brussels, where in 1950, he became professor. In 1959, he was appointed director of the International Solvay Institute in Brussels, Belgium. In that year, he also started teaching at the University of Texas at Austin in the United States, where he later was appointed Regental Professor and Ashbel Smith Professor of Physics and Chemical Engineering. From 1961 until 1966 he was affiliated with the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. In Austin, in 1967, he co-founded the Center for Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics, now The Center for Complex Quantum Systems.[10] In that year, he also returned to Belgium, where he became director of the Center for Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics.

He was a member of numerous scientific organizations, and received numerous awards, prizes and 53 honorary degrees. In 1955, Ilya Prigogine was awarded the Francqui Prize for Exact Sciences. For this study in irreversible thermodynamics, he received the Rumford Medal in 1976, and in 1977, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 1989, he was awarded the title of Viscount in the Belgian nobility by the King of the Belgians. Until his death, he was president of the International Academy of Science and was in 1997, one of the founders of the International Commission on Distance Education (CODE), a worldwide accreditation agency. In 1998 he was awarded an honoris causa doctorate by the UNAM in Mexico City.

Prigogine was first married to Belgian poet Hélène Jofé /in literature Hélène Prigogine/(son Yves 1945). After their divorce, he married Polish-born chemist Maria Prokopowicz(-Prigogine) in 1961 (son Pascal 1970).[11] In 2003 he was one of 21 Nobel Laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto.[12]

Research

Prigogine is best known for his definition of dissipative structures and their role in thermodynamic systems far from equilibrium, a discovery that won him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977. In summary, Ilya Prigogine discovered that importation and dissipation of energy into chemical systems could reverse the maximization of entropy rule imposed by the second law of thermodynamics.[13]

Dissipative structures theory

Dissipative structure theory led to pioneering research in self-organizing systems, as well as philosophical inquiries into the formation of complexity on biological entities and the quest for a creative and irreversible role of time in the natural sciences.

His work is seen by many as a bridge between natural sciences and social sciences. With professor Robert Herman, he also developed the basis of the two fluid model, a traffic model in traffic engineering for urban networks, analogous to the two fluid model in classical statistical mechanics.

Prigogine's formal concept of self-organization was used also as a "complementary bridge" between General Systems Theory and Thermodynamics, conciliating the cloudiness of some important systems theory concepts with scientific rigour.

Work on unsolved problems in physics

In his later years, his work concentrated on the fundamental role of Indeterminism in nonlinear systems on both the classical and quantum level. Prigogine and coworkers proposed a Liouville space extension of quantum mechanics. A Liouville space is the vector space formed by the set of (self-adjoint) linear operators, equipped with an inner product, that act on a Hilbert space.[14] There exists a mapping of each linear operator into Liouville space, yet not every self-adjoint operator of Liouville space has a counterpart in Hilbert space, and in this sense Liouville space has a richer structure than Hilbert space.[15] The Liouville space extension proposal by Prigogine and co-workers aimed to solve the arrow of time problem of thermodynamics and the measurement problem of quantum mechanics.[16]

Prigogine also co-authored several books with Isabelle Stengers, including End of Certainty and La Nouvelle Alliance (Order out of Chaos).

The End of Certainty

In his 1996 book, La Fin des certitudes, published in English in 1997 as The End of Certainty: time, chaos, and the new laws of nature, Prigogine contends that determinism is no longer a viable scientific belief. "The more we know about our universe, the more difficult it becomes to believe in determinism." This is a major departure from the approach of Newton, Einstein and Schrödinger, all of whom expressed their theories in terms of deterministic equations. According to Prigogine, determinism loses its explanatory power in the face of irreversibility and instability.

Prigogine traces the dispute over determinism back to Darwin, whose attempt to explain individual variability according to evolving populations inspired Ludwig Boltzmann to explain the behavior of gases in terms of populations of particles rather than individual particles. This led to the field of statistical mechanics and the realization that gases undergo irreversible processes. In deterministic physics, all processes are time-reversible, meaning that they can proceed backward as well as forward through time. As Prigogine explains, determinism is fundamentally a denial of the arrow of time. With no arrow of time, there is no longer a privileged moment known as the "present," which follows a determined "past" and precedes an undetermined "future." All of time is simply given, with the future as determined or undetermined as the past. With irreversibility, the arrow of time is reintroduced to physics. Prigogine notes numerous examples of irreversibility, including diffusion, radioactive decay, solar radiation, weather and the emergence and evolution of life. Like weather systems, organisms are unstable systems existing far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Instability resists standard deterministic explanation. Instead, due to sensitivity to initial conditions, unstable systems can only be explained statistically, that is, in terms of probability.

Prigogine asserts that Newtonian physics has now been "extended" three times[citation needed], first with the use of the wave function in quantum mechanics, then with the introduction of spacetime in general relativity and finally with the recognition of indeterminism in the study of unstable systems.

Publications

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ H. Bunke, T. Kanade, H. Noltemeier (ed.), Modelling and Planning for Sensor Based Intelligent Robot Systems, World Scientific, 1995, p. 438.
  2. ↑ Gunter, P. A. Y. (1991), "Bergson and non-linear non-equilibrium thermodynamics: an application of method", Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 45: 177, pp. 108–21.
  3. ↑ Michel Serres, Hermes, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982, p. 135.
  4. ↑ Francis Leroy. A century of Nobel Prizes recipients: chemistry, physics, and medicine (p. 80). Books.google.com. Retrieved 2012-03-12. 
  5. ↑ 12:03AM BST 05 Jun 2003 (2003-06-05). "Vicomte Ilya Prigogine (Obituary, The Telegraph)". Telegraph.co.uk. Retrieved 2012-03-12. 
  6. ↑ Magnus Ramage, Karen Shipp. Systems Thinkers (p. 227). Books.google.com. Retrieved 2012-03-12. 
  7. ↑ "Andrew Robinson. Time and notion". Timeshighereducation.co.uk. 1998-07-17. Retrieved 2012-03-12. 
  8. ↑ "Time and Change". Chaosforum.com. 2003-05-28. Retrieved 2012-03-12. 
  9. ↑ "Biography of Ilya Prigogine". Pagerankstudio.com. Retrieved 2012-03-12. 
  10. ↑ "Nobel Prize-winning physical chemist dies in Brussels at age 86". Utexas.edu. 2003-05-28. Retrieved 2012-12-19. 
  11. ↑ Prigogine, Ilya. (2003). Curriculum Vitae of Ilya Prigogine In Is future given. World Scientific.
  12. ↑ "Notable Signers". Humanism and Its Aspirations. American Humanist Association. Retrieved October 4, 2012. 
  13. ↑ Macklem, P. T. (3 April 2008). "Emergent phenomena and the secrets of life". Journal of Applied Physiology 104 (6): 1844–1846. doi:10.1152/japplphysiol.00942.2007. 
  14. ↑ Gregg Jaeger: Quantum Information: An Overview, Springer, 2007, ISBN 978-0-387-35725-6, Chapter B.3 "Lioville space and open quantum systems", p. 248
  15. ↑ T. Sida, K. Saitô, Si Si (eds.): Quantum Information and Complexity: Proceedings of the Meijo Winter School, 6–10 January 2003, World Scientific Publishing, 2004, ISBN 971-256-047-5, p. 62
  16. ↑ T. Petrosky; I. Prigogine (1997). "The Liouville Space Extension of Quantum Mechanics". Adv. Chem. Phys. Advances in Chemical Physics 99: 1–120. doi:10.1002/9780470141588.ch1. ISBN 978-0-470-14158-8. 

References

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