Prigogine's work most notably earned him the 1977Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures”,[6] as well as theFrancqui Prize in 1955, and theRumford Medal in 1976.
Prigogine was born inMoscow a few months before theOctober Revolution of 1917, into aJewish family.[7] His father, Ruvim (Roman) Abramovich Prigogine, was achemist who studied at theImperial Moscow Technical School and owned a soap factory; his mother, Yulia Vikhman, was a pianist who attended theMoscow Conservatory. In 1921, the factory having beennationalized by thenew Soviet regime and the feeling of insecurity rising amidst thecivil war, the family left Russia. After a brief period inLithuania, they went toGermany and settled inBerlin; 8 years later, due to the poor economic situation and the creeping emergence ofNazism, they moved on toBrussels, where Prigogine received Belgian nationality in 1949. His brotherAlexandre (1913–1991) became an ornithologist.[8]
As a teenager, Prigogine was interested in music, history and archeology. He graduated from theAthenée d'Ixelles in 1935, majoring in Greek and Latin. His parents encouraged him to become a lawyer, and he initially enrolled in law studies at theFree University of Brussels. At that time he developed an interest inpsychology and thestudy of behavior; in turn, reading about these subjects triggered an interest inchemistry, as chemical processes impact themind andbody; this also triggered a more fundamental interest inphysics, as they explain chemistry. He ended up dropping out from the law faculty.[9]
Prigogine afterwards simultaneously enrolled inchemistry andphysics at theFree University of Brussels, something he achieved with "uncommon success"; he earned the equivalent of a Master's degree in both disciplines in 1939, and a PhD in chemistry in 1941 underThéophile de Donder.[9][10]
He started his research career under theGerman occupation of Belgium. From 1940 onwards he gave clandestine lectures to students. In 1941, the university formally closed to protest the forced appointment ofFlemish pro-NaziNew Order professors by the occupiers;[11] he continued giving clandestine lectures until theLiberation of Belgium in 1944. During that time window he also published 21 articles. In 1943, Prigogine and his future wife Hélène Jofé were arrested by the Germans; after multiple interventions including by theQueen Elisabeth, they were eventually released a couple of weeks later.[9]
In 1951, he became a full professor at his alma mater; at 34 years old, he was the youngest ever full professor at the science faculty inBrussels.[9] In 1959, he was appointed director of theInternational Solvay Institute inBrussels,Belgium. In that year, he also started teaching at theUniversity of Texas at Austin in theUnited States, where he later was appointed Regental Professor and Ashbel Smith Professor of Physics and Chemical Engineering. From 1961 until 1966 he was affiliated with theEnrico Fermi Institute at theUniversity of Chicago and was a visiting professor atNorthwestern University.[12][13] In Austin, in 1967, he co-founded the Center for Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics, now theCenter for Complex Quantum Systems.[14] In that year, he also returned toBelgium, where he became director of the Center for Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics.
He was a member of numerous scientific organizations, and received numerous awards, prizes and 53 honorary degrees. In 1955, Prigogine was awarded theFrancqui Prize for Exact Sciences. For his study inirreversiblethermodynamics, he received theRumford Medal in 1976, and in 1977, theNobel Prize inChemistry "for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory ofdissipative structures".[6] In 1989, he was awarded the title ofviscount in theBelgian nobility by theKing of the Belgians. Until his death, he was president of the International Academy of Science, Munich and was in 1997, one of the founders of the International Commission on Distance Education (CODE), a worldwide accreditation agency.[15][16] Prigogine received an Honorary Doctorate fromHeriot-Watt University in 1985[17] and in 1998 he was awarded anhonoris causa doctorate by theUNAM inMexico City.
Prigogine was first married to Belgian poet Hélène Jofé (as an author also known as Hélène Prigogine) and in 1945 they had a son Yves. After their divorce, he married Polish-bornchemist Maria Prokopowicz (also known as Maria Prigogine) in 1961. In 1970 they had a son, Pascal.[18]
Prigogine defineddissipative structures and their role inthermodynamic systems far fromequilibrium,[1][2][5] a discovery that won him theNobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977.[6] In summary, Ilya Prigogine discovered that importation and dissipation of energy into chemical systems could result in the emergence of new structures (hence dissipative structures) due to internal self reorganization.[20][21][22] In his 1955 text, Prigogine drew connections between dissipative structures and theRayleigh-Bénard instability and theTuring mechanism.[23] And his 1977 work on self-reorganization was recognized as relevant for psychology.[24]
With professorRobert Herman, he also developed the basis of thetwo fluid model,[25] a traffic model intraffic engineering for urban networks, analogous to the two fluid model in classical statistical mechanics,[25][26] a common problem that had attracted Prigogine's attention some years before.[27]
Prigogine's formal concept ofself-organization was used also as a "complementary bridge" betweengeneral systems theory andthermodynamics, conciliating the cloudiness of some important systems theory concepts such asentropy instead of molecular disorder,[28][which?] andemergence, fluctuations and irreversibility instead of “birth and death”[3][29] with scientific rigor.[21][30]
In his later years, his work concentrated on the fundamental role ofindeterminism innonlinear systems on both theclassical andquantum level. Prigogine and coworkers proposed aLiouville space extension of quantum mechanics.[31][32]A Liouville space is thevector space formed by the set of (self-adjoint)linear operators, equipped with an inner product, that act on aHilbert space.[33] There exists a mapping of each linear operator into Liouville space, yet not every self-adjoint operator of Liouville space has a counterpart in Hilbert space, and in this sense Liouville space has a richer structure than Hilbert space.[34] The Liouville space extension proposal by Prigogine and co-workers aimed to solve thearrow of time problem of thermodynamics and themeasurement problem of quantum mechanics.[32]
Prigogine co-authored several books withIsabelle Stengers, includingThe End of Certainty andLa Nouvelle Alliance (Order out of Chaos).
In his 1996 book,La Fin des certitudes, written in collaboration with Isabelle Stengers and published in English in 1997 asThe End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature, Prigogine contends that determinism is no longer a viable scientific belief: "The more we know about our universe, the more difficult it becomes to believe in determinism." This is a major departure from the approach ofNewton,Einstein andSchrödinger, all of whom expressed their theories in terms of deterministic equations. According to Prigogine, determinism loses its explanatory power in the face ofirreversibility andinstability.
Prigogine traces the dispute over determinism back toDarwin, whose attempt to explain individual variability according to evolving populations inspiredLudwig Boltzmann to explain the behavior of gases in terms of populations of particles rather than individual particles.[35] This led to the field ofstatistical mechanics and the realization that gases undergoirreversible processes. In deterministic physics, all processes are time-reversible, meaning that they can proceed backward as well as forward through time. As Prigogine explains, determinism is fundamentally a denial of thearrow of time. With no arrow of time, there is no longer a privileged moment known as the "present," which follows a determined "past" and precedes an undetermined "future." All of time is simply given, with the future as determined or as undetermined as the past. With irreversibility, the arrow of time is reintroduced to physics. Prigogine notes numerous examples of irreversibility, includingdiffusion,radioactive decay,solar radiation,weather and the emergence and evolution oflife. Like weather systems, organisms are unstable systems existing far fromthermodynamic equilibrium. Instability resists standard deterministic explanation. Instead, due to sensitivity to initial conditions, unstable systems can only be explained statistically, that is, in terms ofprobability.
Prigogine, I.The Behavior of Matter under Nonequilibrium Conditions: Fundamental Aspects and Applications in Energy-oriented Problems,United States Department of Energy, Progress Reports:
Prigogine, Ilya (1993).Chaotic Dynamics and Transport in Fluids and Plasmas: Research Trends in Physics Series. New York: American Institute of Physics.ISBN0-88318-923-2.
The Ilya Prigogine Prize for Thermodynamics was initialized in 2001 and patronized by Ilya Prigogine himself until his death in 2003. It is awarded on a biennial basis during the Joint European Thermodynamics Conference (JETC) and considers all branches of thermodynamics (applied, theoretical, and experimental as well as quantum thermodynamics and classical thermodynamics).
^Gregg Jaeger:Quantum Information: An Overview, Springer, 2007,ISBN978-0-387-35725-6, Chapter B.3 "Lioville space and open quantum systems",p. 248
^T. Sida, K. Saitô, Si Si (eds.):Quantum Information and Complexity: Proceedings of the Meijo Winter School, 6–10 January 2003, World Scientific Publishing, 2004,ISBN978-981-256-047-6,p. 62
^Carruthers, Peter (1990). "review ofExploring Complexity: An Introduction by Grégoire Nicolis and Ilya Prigogine".Physics Today.43 (10):96–97.Bibcode:1990PhT....43j..96N.doi:10.1063/1.2810725.
