Yes, I know 'Nobel season' is over, the articles (and blog posts, including a couple here) that it regularly generates have been written and for the most part forgotten, though they might be taken out of drawers again next October when related cogitations come into play.
But I want to revisit the institution of the Nobel Prize for a second, in the process harkening back to 1977. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry that year went to Ilya Prigogine "for his contributions to non-equilibrium thernodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures."
The fascinating thing is, not only that Prigogine's contribution was fallacious, but that it was known to be such (by researchers on the cutting edge of chemistry, if not to the members of the Nobel committee) before the prize was awarded.
What is non-equilibrium thermodynamics? Well, let's take that mouthful apart. Thermodynamics is the study of heat and its relationship to matter. In chemistry (as distinct from physics) it is the study of heat impacting matter at the molecular level. Equilibrium thermodynamics is the study of the conditions in which there is no ongoing change in the material structures because the thermal, mechanical, and chemical aspects of the system are in equilibrium. Non-equilibrium thermodynamics, then, is anything else -- the changes in material structures caused by the lack of an equilibrium. This is also the boundary line between chemistry and biochemistry. Chemists have to figure out non-equilibrium dynamics in order to lay a deep foundation for our understanding of living systems.
Speaking in general and non-technical terms, we can say that there are certain systems that are CLOSE TO equilibrium. These not-too-badly-non-equilibrium thermo-chemical systems can be understood by extrapolation from the equilibrium condition with the help of linear equations developed by Lars Onsager.
But Onsager's work left open the obvious question: what can we say about systems that get too far from equilibrium for those equations to be helpful? Prigogine seemed to have advanced the discussion of that subject in 1970 when he and a collaborator, Paul Glansdorff, announced a theory of "dissipative structures," that is, thermodynamically open structures far from equilibrium that take free energy out of the environment and dissipate it as high-entropy refuse. That description covers not just living organisms, but the thermal aspects of tornadoes, ecosystems, etc. In other words, Prigogine (Glansdorff soon fell out of the picture as Prigogine proceeded to elaborate and popularize the idea on his own) had come up with a model of very wide applicability, destined it seemed to become central not only to chemistry but to meteorology, biology, and even sociology (which presumably would learn to treat cities and markets as dissipative structures.)
Three physicists -- Joel Keizer, Ronald Fox, and Phil Anderson -- in essence had persuaded their peers by 1977 that Progogine had gotten way ahead of the actual evidence in his formulations. It is valuable to treat of self-organizing systems in terms of a comprehensive theory, but the dissipation of energy will not be the central pillar of that theory Prigogine thought it would be, and work in the area since then has gone in very different directions.
Prigogine himself has (subsequent to pocketing the prize money from the Nobel) stopped referring to the specifics of his earlier work in his writings. He has re-invented himself as a 'chaos theory' guru. I'm read that former colleagues in physics and chemistry regard him as something of an embarrassment, rather the way serious journalists think of Geraldo Rivera.
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