Talk:Ilya Prigogine

Name

Any idea how to pronounce his name? Maybe this could be listed somewhere...

If it is pronounced like in russian (Пригожин), then it sounds like: p as p in play; r as r in read; i as i in insect (well, not sure about this); g as g in got; o as aw in saw; g as s in vision; i as i in insect; n as n in now; e - [not pronounced].

With the emphasize on sound "o". Jackbars 20:46, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

Answer: Your guess is correct, you can hear it at http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?Prigogine. It would be nice to add the pronounciation to the article.

At the point of bifurcation a system, as it passes through the instability, spontaneously emerges as a system of higher complexity. It has been said that at the point of 'emergence' the original system has an infinite number of pathways it can choose from before it reaches it's state of higher complexity. Or is it the case that as the system becomes more complex the number of pathways it has to choose from diminishes, until we are left with a system of "penultimate complexity" which has only one pathway it can 'choose'. This would have some interesting implications for Evolutionary Theory.

Controversies

His theory is not well-accepted in scientific community, partly due to its own flaw, partly because the way he has promoted it. I remembered in 80s and 90s there was a cult-like passion for dissipative system (outside chemistry/physics, ironically) which had disgusted many...and eventually this trend faded out. 05:40, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Yes I have also heard about the nonacceptance of his theories... it would be nice to get some detail

on what the faults are in his theories. This is important, since this guy won a Noble, there should

be some discussion on the problems of his contributions. Dru007 13:24, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

I just found a good link where someone describes the flaws in his theories. I'm probably not competent to

paraphrase it in the main article, so I will just give the link here and hopefully someone with some expertise

can work it into a paragraph:

http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/prigogine.html (Moved to http://bactra.org/notebooks/prigogine.html --Dominique Meeùs (talk) 06:34, 16 October 2016 (UTC))

Dru007 23:35, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, but the link that you give is not a good one. Cosma Shalizi says about himself: "I am hostile to all this". The problem is not that he is hostile but he is both biased and wrong. For instance, Shalizi writes:

the breakthrough to treating non-equilibrium, irreversible processes was made, not by Prigogine in the 1950s and 1960s (as one reads in far too many books), but by Lars Onsager in the 1920s

and then he links to the Nobel page devoted to Onsager. But why does Shalizi omit to link also to the Nobel page devoted to Prigogine? If Shalizi knows the basis of non-equilibrium thermodynamics, he would notice to his readers that Onsager work only applies on the linearized non-equilibrium regime and cannot be the foundation for a thermodynamics valid also for systems far-from-equilibrium. It is in the non-linear regime where Prigogine did the contributions for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1977 (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1977/presentation-speech.html):

Even an irreversible system as simple as the thermocouple, with its simultaneous conduction of heat and electricity, could not be satisfactorily treated until Onsager developed the reciprocity relations which earned him the 1968 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. The reciprocity relations were a great step forward in the development of a thermodynamics of irreversible processes, but they presupposed a linear approximation. which can only be employed relatively close to equilibrium.

Prigogine's great contribution lies in his successful development of a satisfactory theory of non-linear thermodynamics in states which are far removed from equilibrium. In doing so he has discovered phenomena and structures of completely new and completely unexpected types, with the result that this generalized, nonlinear and irreversible thermodynamics has already been given surprising applications in a wide variety of fields.

Another example where Shalizi is not just hostile but both biased and wrong is when he cites Prigogine classic monograph in the next terms:

his Thermodynamics of Irreversible Processes is a model of lucidity, and while inevitably dated (the last revision was in 1967), suffers for the most part from the omission of new results, not the commission of definite errors

But why does Shalizi fail to notice the updated monograph "Modern Thermodynamics: From Heat Engines to Dissipative Structures", by Dilip Kondepudi & Ilya Prigogine, published in 1998 by Wiley? This monograph contains new material, including recent (up to that year) references to specialized literature.

Moreover, the contributions of Cosma Shalizi to problems as that of the arrow of time are easily summarized: zero. This is the reason which he is obligated to cite Raissa D'Souza and Norman Margolus preprint, J. Bricmont work, two reviews of books, and two philosophical-like papers, one by Roger C. Bishop and other by Bram Edens.

The preprint by Raissa D'Souza and Norman Margolus is another instance of what N. G. van Kampen named mathematical funambulism. Shalizi recommends reading to the recognized expert N. G. van Kampen in his notebook (http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/stochastic-processes.html). Well, van Kampen was one of several experts who understood that the attempt by Boltzmann to derive irreversibility from reversible equations was a, van Kampen own words, logical impossibility. The mistakes done by Boltzmann and others are well-known and often reported in textbooks. We do not need to repeat them, but non-experts as Bricmont, Shalizi, and others want to repeat them.

van Kampen even warned us about how non-experts repeat old mistakes in new (invalid) papers. van Kampen wrote: "Regularly new articles are published which pretend to provide a real derivation", but those new articles just add some new amount of mathematical funambulism in their attempt to convince us that irreversibility is a consequence of reversibility.

The work by J. Bricmont is another instance of the mathematical funambulism denounced by van Kampen, except that Bricmont's work contains the bonus that he also misread Prigogine's work. This evident misreading done by Bricmont is even noticed by the same references that Shalizi gives us! E.g. both Roger C. Bishop and Bram Edens notice how Bricmont does not understand Prigogine. Edens even points out that the solution to the problem of irreversibility given by Bricmont is invalid. The first time that I read Bricmont's work was so shocked that my first reaction was to contact Prigogine to write a rebuttal about all that nonsense. I still remind Prigogine words:

Bricmont is completely wrong.

After that I calmed down and I decided that a new paper only would increase Bricmont's misconception and I never wrote it.

Another biased and wrong statement by Shalizi is the next:

Next after this is the claim that Prigogine played a big part in the origins of chaos theory. His advances are easily summarized: Prigogine made no significant contributions to nonlinear dynamics.

The first part is rather correct, deterministic chaos was discovered even before Prigogine was born. Prigogine has always emphasized the pioonering work by Poincaré, and most of his lasy work is devoted to the role of Poincaré resonances (see references cited below). The second statement by Shalizi is not correct. Prigogine and his group have done contributions to nonlinear dynamics and non-deterministic chaos. See for instance the next papers:

- "Poincaré Resonances and the Extension of Classical Dynamics" (with T. Petrosky) Chaos, Solitons, and Fractals 7, 441-498.

- "Nonlinear Science and the Laws of Nature" Intl. Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos 7, 1917-1926.

Where the authors give new material, including nonlinear equations. I am not saying that everything here is fine, but the statement by Shalizi cannot be trusted.

CONCLUSION:

The personal webpage by Shalizi has not the quality to be cited in the Wikipedia. It is biased, wrong, and lacks citation to modern references. I recommend its elimination from this article.

EXTRA LINKS:

The next links can give a better idea of Prigogine contributions to science.

http://www.crs4.it/CISST/Curriculum-Prigogine.html

http://order.ph.utexas.edu/Prigogine.htm

JuanR (talk) 18:46, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

WikiProject class rating

This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot 09:54, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

References

• Grégoire Nicolis (2003). "Obituary: Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003): Structure Formation Far from Equilibrium". Angewandte Chemie International Edition. 42 (29): 3324–3325. doi:10.1002/anie.200390530.
• André de Palma. "In Memoriam: Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003)". Transportation Science. 37 (3): 255–256. doi:10.1287/trsc.37.3.255.16048.
• Albert Goldbeter (2003). "Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003)". Journal of Biosciences. 28 (6): 657–659. doi:10.1007/BF02708424.
• Erkki Brändas (2004). "A tribute to Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003)". International Journal of Quantum Chemistry. 98 (2): 59–59. doi:10.1002/qua.10880.
• A. Sanfeld, M. G. Velarde (2004). "Ilya Priogogine and the classical thermodynamics of irreversible processes". Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics. 29 (1): 1–8. doi:10.1515/JNETDY.2004.001.
• Gustafson, Karl (2003). "Professor Ilya Prigogine: January 25, 1917 -- May 28, 2003 A Personal and Scientific Remembrance" (PDF). Mind and Matter. 1 (1): 9–13.

--Stone (talk) 10:10, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Copy-paste / translation registration

In this edit text was copy/paste and translated from the German de:Ilya Prigogine article. -- Mdd (talk) 19:54, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Which calendar?

Was "25 January 1917" according to the old Julian calendar still then applying in Russia, or has it been converted to the Gregorian calendar from 12 January? -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 07:19, 28 August 2010 (UTC)

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