Daily Archives: February 4, 2017

What’s new on the Pauling Blog? Ilya Prigogine: The Poet of Thermodynamics

There’s a new post on the Pauling blog celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Ilya Prigogine.

prigogine-1

“The attitude of Einstein toward science, for example, was to go beyond the reality of the moment. He wanted to transcend time…for him science was an introduction to a timeless reality beyond the illusion of becoming. My own attitude is very different because, to some extent, I want to feel the evolution of things. I don’t believe in transcending, but in being embedded in a reality that is temporal.”

Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003) is best known today for his work in thermodynamics and especially for his focus on the concepts of irreversibility and dissipative structures. He was a champion of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, compelled by a lifelong fascination with biology’s apparent denial of the principals of physics, and his work is often described as having attempted to marry thermodynamics – particularly the concept of entropy – to biological evolution.

Read the whole post on the Pauling Blog.