Prigogine, Ilya (1917-2003)

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Nobel prize laureate, physicist specialised in thermodynamics, born in Moscow on 25 January 1917 and died in Brussels on 28 May 2003.

Biography

Little Ilya was born a couple of months before the russian revolution. Difficulties with the Soviet regime caused the Prigogine-family to leave Russia in 1921. After travelling about through Lithuania and Germany, the family finally ended their journey by settling in Belgium in 1929. Prigogine, then aged twelve, joined the athaeneum of Elsene to study Greek and Latin. After his secundary eduction, het went on to study chemistry at the university of Brussels. In 1939 he received his licenciate in chemistry and physics. In 1941 he received his Ph.D in chemistry. After that things started moving: in 1945 the ambitious chemist obtained his aggregate for higher education and two years later he was appointed as a professor at the ULB. Prigogine taught, among other subjects, thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. In 1949 he was officially granted the Belgian nationality.

At the ULB was appointed extraordinary professor in 1950 and ordinary (full) professor in 1951. In 1959 he was appointed as director of the Solvay Institute in Brussels. In the same year he also started to teach at the University of Texas (Austin), where he founded the Center for Complex Quantum Systems. From 1961 until 1966 he was a member of the Enrico Fermi Institute of the University of CHicago. In 1967 he was appointed professor of physics and chemical technology at the University of Texas. Where he, moreover, became the director of the Center for Studies in Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics. From 1967 on, he devided his time between Brussels and Austin. In 1977 the University of Texas appointed Prigogine as regental professor.

In his research, Prigogine was strongly influenced by Théophile De Donder and Jean Émile Charles Timmermans. Under Prigogine's influence, the Brussels school of thermodynamics, founded by De Donder, gained international fame.

Prigogine became a corresponding member of the Académie royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique on 12 December 1953 and effective member on 10 December 1960. He was president of the Academy in 1969. In the same year, he was also president of the Class of Sciences. He was corresponding member of the Société royale des Sciences de Liège. He was a member of the Belgian Society of Biophysics. He was a member of more than 58 scientific academies, including that of his native Russia. At the NFWO, he was a member of the Physicochemistry and Electrochemistry Committee.

In 1946, the chemist of Russian origin was awarded the Van Laar Prize. In 1951, he received the Adolphe Wetrems Prize, followed four years later by the Francqui Prize for exact sciences. In 1965, Prigogine added the Ernst-John Solvay prize to his record of achievements. Prigogine held the Francqui Chair at the State University of Liège for the period 1957 to 1958. For his study of the thermodynamics of irreversible processes, he was awarded the Rumford Medal in 1976. He also collected some 50 honorary doctorates, including from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and the University of Poitiers. In 1986, King Baudouin made him a viscount. He received the Grand Cross in the Order of Leopold II and he was Commander in the French Legion of Honour. In 1987, he became an honorary professor at the ULB.

And finally, in 1977, Prigogine received the greatest honour: the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, in particular the theory of dissipative structures.

The Haute Ecole Libre de Bruxelles, affiliated to the ULB was named after Ilya Prigogine (HELB IP). Prigogine was the founder of the Ilya Prigogine Prize in Thermodynamics. This prize is awarded every two years to a promising researcher in thermodynamics by the European Centre for Advanced Studies in Thermodynamics.

Works

Prigogine wrote more than 20 books and about 1,000 articles. His PhD dealt with thermodynamics, in particular the special meaning of time.

In his research, Prigogine built on the work of Théophile De Donder. The latter had limited himself to reactive systems held uniformly in space. Prigogine extended this to a much wider class of systems in the 1940s. His contributions, as well as those of Lars Onsager, Eckhart and Josef Meixner, led to a coherent formulation that still serves as a starting point for the formalism of the thermodynamics of irreversible processes. An exposition of this formulation can be found in Prigogine's aggregation thesis published in 1947, Existing thermodynamics discussed only systems in equilibrium. Lars Onsager (1903-1976) had already pointed out this limitation and started the thermodynamic study of non-equilibrium systems. Prigogine extended this to systems far from their equilibrium: the dissipative (spreading, vanishing, expanding) structures.

At the same time, Prigogine attached great importance to the role of the notion of time. In his book "The End of Certainty" (1997), he explained: equilibrium processes are reversible in time and therefore have no preferred direction. It is imposed by external circumstances, in other words by a determinism that denies the direction of time. The direction of time propels processes towards irreversibility. Indeed, most natural processes take place according to a time sequence. Prigogine gave as examples of irreversibility: diffusion, radioactive decay, solar radiation, the weather, the biological cell, the origin and evolution of life. Organisms are unstable systems, far from their thermodynamic equilibrium, which can only be explained statistically, i.e. with probabilities, and not deterministically.

In Prigogine and Onsager's formulation, all variables involved relate to irreversible processes, with dissipative character. In the presence of inertial elements (circuits with inductive elements, etc ...), the theorem is no longer valid. The search for a universal evolutionary principle or evolutionary criterion occupied Belgian thermodynamicists for almost two decades. In 1954, Prigogine and Paul Glansdorff discovered a universal inequality for part of the variation of entropy production associated with the variation of generalised forces. After further research, both men had to abandon a universal variational formulation, but they found that the uniqueness and stability of the non-equilibrium regimes were in question. This led to the thermodynamic stability criterion vs small perturbations in 1971. These results were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977.

With Raymond Defay, Prigogine wrote Tension superficielle et adsorption (1952), an authoritative text to this day. Still with Defay, he wrote a "Treatise on Thermodynamics: Based on the Methods of Gibbs and De Donder".

Statistical Mechanics

Traditional methods of statistical mechanics of equilibrium were used by Prigogine to interpret the properties of mixtures in condensed phase. His approach is succinctly described in the 1957 monograph "The Molecular Theory of Solutions". The microscopic study of non-equilibrium phenomena bears the most characteristic signature of the Belgian school of statistical mechanics. Here Prigogine appealed to the classical tools of kinetic gas theory, in particular Boltzmann's transport equation. In 1953, Prigogine and his English collaborator Gerhardt Klein addressed the question of what type of irreversible behaviour could occur in harmonic solids. In 1955, Léon Van Hove came up with the first satisfactory derivation of a transport equation from the formalism of quantum mechanics. His work was generalised in 1956 by Prigogine, in collaboration with his postdoctoral researcher Robert Brout.

Driven by Prigogine, research was carried out to derive "exact" irreversible evolutionary equations from the probability distributions, with the main characteristic of integrating concepts and tools of ergodic theory and functional analysis.

Life Sciences

The apparent contradiction between the growing complexity of living organisms in biological evolution and the increase in entropy in an isolated system was also central to Prigogine's work. Initially, he explored the implications of the theorem of minimum production of entropy. Later, he developed the concept of dissipative structure, which opened a new path and accelerated research. Prigogine developed a kinetic model that proved to be simultaneously simple and instructive. This model was called the Brusselator. It generated a wide variety of structures created by diffusive-reaction processes.

Fluid Mechanics and transport phenomena

Fluid mechanics offers many examples of irreversible processes, from the transfer of mass and heat to spectacular non-linear behaviour leading to ordered structures in heat convection or to spatiotemporal chaos and turbulence. Starting in 1970, Prigogine and Paul Glansdorff explored an interesting class of such phenomena, with couplings between diffusion and conduction of heat. They used the method of local potentials as well as digital and analytical methods, which was accompanied by laboratory experiments.

De vloeistofmechanica biedt vele voorbeelden van irreversibele processen, vanaf de transfer van massa en warmte tot spectaculaire niet-lineaire gedragingen die leiden tot geordende structuren in warmte-convectie of tot spatiotemporele chaos en turbulentie. Vanaf 1970 verkenden Prigogine en Paul Glansdorff een interessante klasse van dergelijke fenomenen, met koppelingen tussen diffusie en geleiding van warmte. Zij gebruikten de methode van lokale potentialen alsook digitale en analytische methoden, wat gepaard ging met laboratoriumproeven.

Philosophy of Science

Ilya Prigogine was the founder of what is known today as 'chaos theory', a theory that essentially says that in a situation of instability elements tend to organise themselves into higher-order structures (auto-organisation). He discovered that not all chemical and physical processes aspire to a certain equilibrium state, as had been assumed until then. He showed that there are so-called far-out-of-equilibrium systems, which possess a self-organising capacity. They develop autonomously in a cycle of creation, stabilisation and destruction without interaction with the environment. Chaos thus becomes more than the dark flip side of order. In the absence of order, there appears to be a creative, generative force in the universe.

Together with Isabelle Stengers, he wrote the book "Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature", which attempts to draw philosophical consequences from irreversible thermodynamics. In Order out of chaos (1984), Prigogine and Stengers argue, "Our view of nature is undergoing a radical change towards multiplicity, timeliness and complexity". Prigogine considered his thermodynamics applicable not only to chemical processes, but also to social evolutions."

Traffic Models

Prigogine also ventured into traffic modelling in urban networks using Bose-Einstein statistics. His work on the theory of automobile traffic confirmed his assumption, that even human behaviour, in all its complexity, can be reduced to mathematical formulas.

Publications

• Short list with publications in the Catalogus KBR, geconsulteerd op 22/02/2011 om 14u.
• List with publications in: Balescu, Radu, "Ilya Prigogine", in: Stuart Alan, Rice, "Special volume in memory of Ilya Prigogine", in: Advances in Chemical Physics, 135 (2007).

Bibliography

• Prigogine, Ilya, "Autobiography Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1977"
• Eftehari, Ali, "Obituary Prof. Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003)", in: Adaptive Behavior, 11 (2003), nr. 2, 129-131.
• "Obituaires: Ilya Prigogine", in: SIAM News, 36 (2003), nr. 7.
• Balduck, Paul, "Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003)", in: Galerij Belgische scheikundigen, KVCV.
• Nicolis, Grégoire, "De thermodynamica, de wetenschap van het niet-lineaire en de statische mechanica", in: Robert Halleux, Geert Vanpaemel, Jan Vandersmissen en Andrée Despy-Meyer (red.), Geschiedenis van de wetenschappen in België 1815-2000, Brussel: Dexia, 2001, vol. 2.
• Stengers, Isabelle, "The challenge of complexity: unfolding the ethics of science in memoriam Ilya Prigogine", in: ECO Special Double Issue, 6 (2004), 92-99.
• "Autobiographie Ilya Prigogine", in: Florilège des Sciences en Belgique, deel 2, Brussel, 1980, 39-51.
• Balescu, Radu, "Ilya Prigogine", in: Stuart Rice (red.), "Special volume in memory of Ilya Prigogine", in: Advances in Chemical Physics, 135 (2007), 1-82.