Throwback Thursday: A Nobel Prize in Chemistry ... 1977

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.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

Search This Blog