From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences

Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003) was a Russian-born naturalized Belgian physical chemist and Nobel Laureate noted for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility. This 1980 book was perhaps his first work intended for a "general reader" (see his Order Out of Chaos) and Is Future Given? and The End of Certainty for later, easier-to-read books). He has three main theses: (1) "irreversible processes are as REAL as reversible ones." (2) "irreversible processes play a fundamental CONSTRUCTIVE role in the physical world." (3) "irreversibility is deeply rooted in dynamics." He adds, "This formulation leads to a unified picture that enables us to relate many aspects of our observations of physical systems to biological ones. The intention is not to 'reduce' physics and biology to a single scheme, but to clearly define the various levels of description and to present conditions that permit us to pass from one level to another." One of his key paragraphs (pg. 83-84) is this: "Biological order is both architectural and functional; furthermore, at the cellular and supercellular levels, it manifests itself by a series of structures and coupled functions of growing complexity and hierarchical character. This is contrary to the concept of evolution as described in the thermodynamics of isolated systems, which leads simply ... to 'disorder.' ... The unexpected new feature is that nonequilibrium may ... lead to a new type of structure, the DISSIPATIVE structures, which are essential in the understanding of coherence and organization in the nonequilibrium world in which we live." He suggests, "most biological mechanisms of action show that life involves far-from-equilibrium conditions beyond the stability of the threshold of the thermodynamic branch. It is therefore very tempting to suggest that the origin of life may be related to successive bifurcations that have led to a state of matter of increasing coherence." He later states, "Therefore, we can now recognize ourselves as a kind of evolved form of dissipative structure..." (pg. 123) Turning to the subject of cosmology, he writes, "However, the questions, What is irreversibility on the cosmic scale? Can we introduce an entropy operator in the framework of a dynamical description in which gravitation plays an essential role? are formidable ones. I prefer to confess my ignorance." (pg. 214) He concludes, "At the origin of thermodynamics we find 'negative' statements expressing the impossibility of certain transformations. In many textbooks, the second law of thermodynamics is expressed as the postulate that it is impossible to transform heat into work using a single thermostat. This negative statement belongs to the macroscopic world--in a sense we have followed its meaning to the microscopic level when it becomes, as we have seen, a statement about the observability of the basic conceptual entities of classical or quantum mechanics. As in relativity, a negative statement is not the