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

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. The problem is that Shalizi omits to cite the Nobel page devoted to Prigogine. If Shalizy know non-equilibrium thermodynamics, would notice that Onsager work only applies to the linearized regime and cannot be the foundation for a true thermodynamics valid also for systems far-from-equilibrium (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 is when Shalizi cites Prigogine classic monograph:

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 then he fails to notice the updated monograph "Modern Thermodynamics: From Heat Engines to Dissipative Structures. by Dilip Kondepudi & Prigogine" published in 1998 by Wiley, which 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 N. G. van Kampen in his (http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/notebooks/stochastic-processes.html). Well, van Kampen was one of several experts who understood that Boltzmann attempt to derive irreversibility from reversible equations was a "logical impossibility". The mistakes done by Boltzmann and others do not need to be repeated.

van Kampen even warned about how "Regularly new articles are published which pretend to provide a real derivation", but there is none except some new amount of mathematical funambulism.

The work by J. Bricmont goes in the same line, except that he also misread Prigogine work. This evident misreading by Bricmont is noticed by the same references that Shalizi gives! E.g. Roger C. Bishop and Bram Edens. Edens even points out how the solution to the problem of irreversibility given by Bricmont is wrong. 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. Still remind Prigogine words:

Bricmont is completely wrong.

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

It is interesting that Shalizi writes

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.

but one thing is that chaos was discovered before Prigogine born and another thing is claiming that he has done no contribution to chaos. See for instance his works

"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.

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:

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:0.1007/BF02708424. {{cite journal}}: Check |doi= value (help)
• 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 ttp://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?diff=176367217&oldid=174164383 edit] text was copy/paste and translated from the German de:Ilya Prigogine article. -- Mdd (talk) 19:54, 28 October 2009 (UTC)