Ilya Prigogine Quotes

We grow in direct proportion to the amount of chaos we can sustain and dissipate

Entropy is the price of structure.

The main character of any living system is openness.

Cindy, have you heard of the second law of thermodynamics?” “Yes. Something about heat energy can never be created or destroyed?” “That’s the first law of thermodynamics. The second one is this…all organized systems tend to slide slowly into chaos and disorder. Energy tends to run down. The universe itself heads inevitably towards darkness and stasis. Our own star system eventually will die, the sun will become a red giant, and the earth will be swallowed by the red giant.” “Cheery thought.” “But mathematics has altered this concept; rather one particular mathematician. His name was Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian mathematician.” “Who and what does that have to do with your being a PI and a great psychologist?” “Are you being sarcastic? Of course you are. Anyway, what I was trying to say was that Prigogine used the analogy of a walled city and open city. The walled city is isolated from its surroundings and will run down, decay, and die. The open city will have an exchange of materials and energy with its surroundings and will become larger and more complex; capable of dissipating energy even as it grows. So my point is, this analogy very much pertains to a certain female. The walled person versus the open person. The walled person will eventually decline, fade, and decay.

Order arise from chaos.

one measure of a book is the degree to which it generates good questions,

The understanding of complexity and the use of the creativity of nature, the continuation of the work of nature are the grand challenges for the scientists of the 21st century.

Only when a system behaves in a sufficiently random way may the difference between past and future, and therefore irreversibility, enter its description.

The irreversibility of time is the mechanism that brings order out of chaos.

on the conviction that nature responds to experimental interrogation.

Ilya Prigogine, chemist; John

Classical science, the mythical science of a simple, passive world, belongs to the past, killed not by philosophical criticism or empiricist resignation but by the internal development of science itself.

Examples of such self-reorganization abound in Order Out of Chaos. Heat moving evenly through a liquid suddenly, at a certain threshold, converts into a convection current that radically reorganizes the liquid, and millions of molecules, as if on cue, suddenly form themselves into hexagonal cells.

Stahl criticized the metaphor of the automaton because, unlike a living being, the purpose of an automaton does not lie within itself; its organization is imposed upon it by its maker.

Each society, as I’ve written elsewhere, betrays its own characteristic “time bias”—the degree to which it places emphasis on past, present, or future. One lives in the past. Another may be obsessed with the future.

Where does the instability of the homogeneous come from? Why does it differentiate spontaneously? Why do things exist at all? Are they the fragile and mortal result of an injustice, a disequilibrium in the static equilibrium of forces between conflicting natural powers? Or do the forces that create and drive things exist autonomously—rival powers of love and hate leading to birth, growth, decline, and dispersion? Is change an illusion or is it, on the contrary, the unceasing struggle between opposites that constitutes things? Can qualitative change be reduced to the motion in a vacuum, of atoms differing only in their forms, or do atoms themselves consist of a multitude of qualitatively different germs, each unlike the others? And last, is the harmony of the world mathematical? Are numbers the key to nature?

Only when a system behaves in a sufficiently random way may the difference between past and future, and therefore irreversibility, enter into its description...The arrow of time is the manifestation of the fact that the future is not given, that, as the French poet Paul Valery emphasized, 'time is a construction'.

When one combines the new insights gained from studying far-from-equilibrium states and nonlinear processes, along with these complicated feedback systems, a whole new approach is opened that makes it possible to relate the so-called hard sciences to the softer sciences of life—and perhaps even to social processes as well. (Such findings have at least analogical significance for social, economic or political realities. Words like “revolution,” “economic crash,” “technological upheaval,” and “paradigm shift” all take on new shades of meaning when we begin thinking of them in terms of fluctuations, feedback amplification, dissipative structures, bifurcations, and the rest of the Prigoginian conceptual vocabulary.) It is these panoramic vistas that are opened to us by Order Out of Chaos.

children in an industrial society are “time trained”—they learn to read the clock, and they learn to distinguish even quite small slices of time, as when their parents tell them, “You’ve only got three more minutes till bedtime!” These sharply honed temporal skills are often absent in slower-moving agrarian societies that require less precision in daily scheduling than our time-obsessed society.

Nature is change, the continual elaboration of the new, a totality being created in an essentially open process of development without any preestablished model. “Life progresses and endures in time.”16 The only part of this progression that intelligence can grasp is what it succeeds in fixing in the form of manipulable and calculable elements and in referring to a time seen as sheer juxtaposition of instants.

according to the Second Law, there is an inescapable loss of energy in the universe. And, if the world machine is really running down and approaching the heat death, then it follows that one moment is no longer exactly like the last. You cannot run the universe backward to make up for entropy. Events over the long term cannot replay themselves. And this means that there is a directionality or, as Eddington later called it, an “arrow” in time.

… one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is flight from everyday life with its painful harshness and wretched dreariness, and from the fetters of one’s own shifting desires. A person with a finer sensibility is driven to escape from personal existence and to the world of objective observing (Schauen) and understanding. This motive can be compared with the longing that irresistibly pulls the town-dweller away from his noisy, cramped quarters and toward the silent, high mountains, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and traces the calm contours that seem to be made for eternity.

Moreover, each culture and each person tends to think in terms of “time horizons.” Some of us think only of the immediate—the now. Politicians, for example, are often criticized for seeking only immediate, short-term results. Their time horizon is said to be influenced by the date of the next election. Others among us plan for the long term. These differing time horizons are an overlooked source of social and political friction—perhaps among the most important. But despite the growing recognition that cultural conceptions of time differ, the social sciences have developed little in the way of a coherent theory of time.

La ambición de ciertas prácticas místicas ha sido siempre la de escapar a las cadenas de la vida, a los tormentos y decepciones de un mundo cambiante y engañoso. En cierto sentido Einstein hizo de esta ambición la vocación misma del físico y, hacendó esto, la tradujo en términos científicos. Los místicos buscaban vivir este mundo como una ilusión; Einstein quiso demostrar que es sólo una ilusión, y que la verdad es un Universo transparente e inteligible, purificado de todo lo que afecta a la vida de los hombres, la memoria nostálgica o dolorosa del pasado, el temor o la esperanza del futuro.

The great characteristic of the mathematical mind is its capacity for dealing with abstractions; and for eliciting from them clear-cut demonstrative trains of reasoning, entirely satisfactory so long as it is those abstractions which you want to think about.

That probability could play a role in the description of complex phenomena was not surprising: Maxwell himself appears to have been influenced by the work of Quetelet, the inventor of the “average” man in sociology. The innovation was to introduce probability in physics not as a means of approximation but rather as an explanatory principle, to use it to show that a system could display a new type of behavior by virtue of its being composed of a large population to which the laws of probability could be applied.

The a priori conditions of experience are also the conditions for the existence of the objects of experience. This celebrated statement sums up the “Copernican revolution” achieved by Kant’s “transcendental” inquiry. The subject no longer “revolves” around its object, seeking to discover the laws by which it is governed or the language by which it may be deciphered. Now the subject itself is at the center, imposing its laws, and the world perceived speaks the language of that subject. No wonder, then, that Newtonian science is able to describe the world from an external, almost divine point of view!

Tradition tells that as a result of a hostile religious and social reaction, philosophers were accused of atheism and were either exiled or put to death. This early “recall to order” may serve as a symbol of the importance of social factors in the origin, and above all the growth, of conceptual innovations. To understand the success of modern science we also have to explain why its founders were as a rule not unduly persecuted and their theoretical approach repressed in favor of a form of knowledge more consistent with social anticipations and convictions

Be that as it may, from Plato and Aristotle onward, the limits were set, and thought was channeled in socially acceptable directions. In particular, the distinction between theoretical thinking and technological activity was established. The words we still use today—machine, mechanical, engineer—have a similar meaning. They do not refer to rational knowledge but to cunning and expediency.

Like the developing embryo, the whole of Aristotelian nature is organized according to final causes. The purpose of all change, if it is in keeping with the nature of things, is to realize in each being the perfection of its intelligible essence. Thus this essence, which, in the case of living creatures, is at one and the same time their final, formal, and effective cause, is the key to the understanding of nature. In this sense the “birth of modern science,” the clash between the Aristotelians and Galileo, is a clash between two forms of rationality.15 In Galileo’s view the question of “why,” so dear to the Aristotelians, was a very dangerous way of addressing nature, at least for a scientist. The Aristotelians, on the other hand, considered Galileo’s attitude as a form of irrational fanaticism.

a comparative analysis such as Needham’s19 exposes the decisive importance of social structures at the close of the Middle Ages. Not only was the class of craftsmen and potential technical innovators not held in contempt, as it was in ancient Greece, but, like the craftsmen, the intellectuals were, in the main, independent of the authorities. They were free entrepreneurs, craftsmen-inventors in search of patronage, who tended to look for novelty and to exploit all the opportunities it afforded, however dangerous

Needham comments that, according to a philosophic conception dominant in China, the cosmos is in spontaneous harmony and the regularity of phenomena is not due to any external authority. On the contrary, this harmony in nature, society, and the heavens originates from the equilibrium among these processes. Stable and interdependent, they resonate with each other in a kind of nonconcerted harmony.

there is a tendency to forget that all science is bound up with human culture in general, and that scientific findings, even those which at the moment appear the most advanced and esoteric and difficult to grasp, are meaningless outside their cultural context.

The incompatibility between the ascetic beauty sought after by science, on the one hand, and the petty swirl of worldly experience so keenly felt by Einstein, on the other, is likely to be reinforced by another incompatibility, this one openly Manichean, between science and society, or, more precisely, between free human creativity and political power. In this case, it is not in an isolated community or in a temple that research would have to be carried out, but in a fortress, or else in a madhouse,

One of the key controversies surrounding this concept has to do with Prigogine’s insistence that order and organization can actually arise “spontaneously” out of disorder and chaos through a process of “self-organization.” To grasp this extremely powerful idea, we first need to make a distinction between systems that are in “equilibrium,” systems that are “near equilibrium,” and systems that are “far from equilibrium.

In classical or mechanistic science, events begin with “initial conditions,” and their atoms or particles follow “world lines” or trajectories. These can be traced either backward into the past or forward into the future. This is just the opposite of certain chemical reactions, for example, in which two liquids poured into the same pot diffuse until the mixture is uniform or homogeneous. These liquids do not de-diffuse themselves. At each moment of time the mixture is different, the entire process is “time-oriented.

Prigogine and Stengers also undermine conventional views of thermodynamics by showing that, under nonequilibrium conditions, at least, entropy may produce, rather than degrade, order, organization—and therefore life. If this is so, then entropy, too, loses its either/or character. While certain systems run down, other systems simultaneously evolve and grow more coherent. This mutualistic, nonexclusive view makes it possible for biology and physics to coexist rather than merely contradict one another.

Prigogine and Stengers caution against leaping to genetic or sociobiological explanations for puzzling social behavior. Many things that are attributed to biological pre-wiring are not produced by selfish, determinist genes, but rather by social interactions under nonequilibrium conditions.

if Prigogine and Stengers are right and chance plays its role at or near the point of bifurcation, after which deterministic processes take over once more until the next bifurcation, are they not embedding chance, itself, within a deterministic framework? By assigning a particular role to chance, don’t they de-chance it?

This property of reversibility in dynamics leads, however, to a difficulty whose full significance was realized only with the introduction of quantum mechanics. Manipulation and measurement are essentially irreversible. Active science is thus, by definition, extraneous to the idealized, reversible world it is describing.

The ancient philosophers had already pointed out that any natural process can be interpreted in many different ways in terms of the motion of and collisions between atoms. This was not a problem for the atomists, since their main aim was to describe a godless, law less world in which man is free and can expect to receive neither punishment nor reward from any divine or natural order. But classical science was a science of engineers and astronomers, a science of action and prediction. Speculations based on hypothetical atoms could not satisfy its needs. In contrast, Newton’s law provided a means of predicting and manipulating. Nature thus becomes law-abiding, docile, and predictable, instead of being chaotic, unruly, and stochastic.

The problem on which Newtonian physics concentrates is the calculation of this second derivative, that is, of the acceleration undergone at each instant by the points that form a system. The motion of each of these points over a finite interval of time can then be calculated by integration, by adding up the infinitesimal velocity changes occurring during this interval. The simplest case is when a is constant (for example, for a freely falling body a is the gravitational constant g). Generally speaking, acceleration itself varies in time, and the physicist’s task is to determine precisely the nature of this variation.

laws of dynamic motion seem to contradict the randomness generally attributed to collisions between atoms. The ancient philosophers had already pointed out that any natural process can be interpreted in many different ways in terms of the motion of and collisions between atoms. This was not a problem for the atomists, since their main aim was to describe a godless, law less world in which man is free and can expect to receive neither punishment nor reward from any divine or natural order. But classical science was a science of engineers and astronomers, a science of action and prediction. Speculations based on hypothetical atoms could not satisfy its needs. In contrast, Newton’s law provided a means of predicting and manipulating. Nature thus becomes law-abiding, docile, and predictable, instead of being chaotic, unruly, and stochastic. But what is the connection between the mortal, unstable world in which atoms unceasingly combine and separate, and the immutable world of dynamics governed by Newton’s law, a single mathematical formula corresponding to an eternal truth unfolding toward a tautological future?

To take hold, any vision with a chance of enduring realization must give people and nations alike confidence that they are once again in charge of their destiny, that they have as fair a shot as anyone else in making something of their lives. The Nobel scientist Ilya Prigogine understood that the present doesn’t determine the future so much as our image of the future determines what we do in the present. Following this insight, to succeed at renovating our societies today, we must paint a convincing image of a future in which everyone has a place.1