- Person
- Ilya Prigogine
- Lived
- 1917–2003
- Field
- Physical chemistry
- From
- Russian-born Belgian
The story
Classical thermodynamics, the science of heat and energy, was built to understand steam engines and deals mainly with systems at equilibrium, where nothing changes. Its famous second law says that, left alone, disorder increases. Yet living things stay highly organized, and nature is full of patterns that seem to form by themselves. How can order arise in a universe that tends toward disorder?
Ilya Prigogine, born into a Jewish family in Moscow in 1917, whose family fled the Soviet regime and later left Germany for Belgium as Nazism rose, spent decades on the question at the Free University of Brussels. In 1945 he proved a theorem about systems held slightly away from equilibrium. Then, working for some twenty years with colleagues including Paul Glansdorff, René Lefever and Grégoire Nicolis, he showed what happens when systems are pushed far from equilibrium by a steady flow of energy and matter. Beyond a critical point they can become unstable and spontaneously form new, ordered structures, which he called dissipative structures because they survive only while they keep consuming energy from their surroundings.
The Swedish Academy gave a simple example when it awarded him the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: a layer of liquid heated from below organizes itself into regular hexagonal convection cells that vanish as soon as the heat is removed. With Lefever and Nicolis, Prigogine built a model of chemical reactions, later nicknamed the Brusselator, showing how reaction and diffusion can create oscillations and patterns. The Academy said the work demonstrated that it is possible to create order from disorder, and that it had already been applied in biology and to social systems.
Prigogine’s ideas gave science a framework for self-organization. They are used to think about living cells, which keep their order only by taking in energy, as well as oscillating chemical reactions, pattern formation in development, chemical reactors and ecosystems. With Robert Herman he also developed a kinetic theory of vehicle traffic that helped found traffic engineering models for city road networks.
Why it matters
Prigogine’s theory of self-organization is used to understand systems from living cells and chemical reactions to traffic flow.
About Ilya Prigogine
Moscow-born Jewish refugee who showed how order arises in systems far from equilibrium, the science of self-organization now used to model living cells, chemical reactions and traffic. Nobel 1977.
Sources
- Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1977 NobelPrize.org
- Ilya Prigogine, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Ilya Prigogine Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.