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From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences
Book by Prigogine, Ilya
272 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
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633 people want to read
About the author
Ilya Prigogine
171 books112 followersIlya, Viscount Prigogine (Russian: Илья́ Рома́нович Приго́жин, Ilya Romanovich Prigozhin) was a Russian-born naturalized Belgian physical chemist and Nobel Laureate noted for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 19, 2018
“for the general reader with some background in physical chemistry and thermodynamics”. Well, to be honest it takes a little bit more than a general reader to fully understand this book. Yet, if you have the required skills to get the whole picture, it is one of the most fascinating book you will ever read! Yeah, it is old and you will soon notice, if you are an updated and avid reader/scientist/amateur fan of science. But do science get really old, when it is proven right? I mean... Newton's law of universal gravitation is old?
April 29, 2012
This 1980 book by a Nobel prize winner in chemistry (non-reversible thermodynamic systems) is today best seen as another step towards chaos theory although that word is not mentioned in this book (the first symposium on "chaos was held in 1977 in New York). He brings up many of the problems of deterministic systems and offers directions to potential general solutions. His main aim is to make readers aware that the development of higher level structures is dependent on irreversible chaotic processes.
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June 29, 2025When a book has pictures, that’s usually my favorite part. This book has lots of pictures, but they were all very scary and I did not like them. I finished reading this following the same protocol I used to I finish thermochemistry in college: quit after one month.
January 5, 2025
AN ANALYSIS OF ENTROPY, TIME, DISSIPATIVE STRUCTURES, AND MUCH MORE
Nobel-Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine wrote in the Preface to this 1980 book, “This book is about time… [A] static view of the world is rooted in the origin of Western science … At the beginning of this century, this static view was almost unanimously accepted by the scientific community … But we have since been moving away from it. A dynamical view in which time plays an essential role prevails in nearly all fields of science… How can we relate these various meanings of time---time as motion, as in dynamics; time related to irreversibility, as in thermodynamics… It is evident that this is not an easy matter. Yet, we are living in a single universe. To reach a coherent view of the world of which we are a part, we must find some way to pass from one description to another…” (Pg. xi-xii)
“A basic aim of this book is to convey to the reader my conviction that we are in a period of scientific revolution---one in which the very position and meaning of the scientific approach are undergirding reappraisal… We come, then, to the main thesis of the book… First, irreversible processes are as REAL as reversible ones… Second, irreversible processes play a fundamental CONSTRUCTIVE role in the physical world… Third, irreversibility is deeply rooted in dynamics. One may say that irreversibility starts where the basic concepts of classical or quantum mechanics … cease to be observables.” (Pg. xiii)
Later, he adds, “I wish to emphasize … that living organisms are far-from-equilibrium objects separated by instabilities from the world of equilibrium and that living organisms are necessarily ‘large,’ macroscopic objects requiring a coherent state of matter in order to produce the complex biomolecules that make the perpetuation of life possible.” (Pg. xv)
He states, “the aim of engineers constructing thermal engines has been to minimize losses due to irreversible processes. It is only recently that a complete change in perspective has arisen, and we begin to understand the CONSTRUCTIVE role played by irreversible processes in the physical world.” (Pg. 78)
He argues, “Biological order is both architectural and functional; furthermore, at the cellular and supercellular levels, it manifests itself by a series of structures and coupled functions of growing complexity and hierarchical character. This is contrary to the concept of evolution as described in the thermodynamics of isolated systems, which leads simply to the state of maximum number of complexions and, therefore, to ‘disorder.’ Do we then have to … introduce… some new principle of nature[?]… The unexpected new feature is that nonequilibrium may… lead to a new type of structure, the DISSIPATIVE structures, which are essential in the understanding of coherence and organization in the nonequilibrium world in which we live.” (Pg. 83-84)
He notes, “It came as a great surprise when it was shown that in systems far from equilibrium the thermodynamic behavior could be quite different---in fact, even DIRECTLY OPPOSITE that predicted by the theorem of minimum entropy production.” (Pg. 88) He continues, “nonequilibrium can be a source of order… this is true not only for hydrodynamic systems, but also for chemical systems if well-defined conditions imposed upon the kinetic laws are satisfied.” (Pg. 89)
He says, “we may imagine that there are always small convection currents appearing as fluctuations from the average state, but below a certain critical value of the temperature gradient, these fluctuations are damped and disappear. However, where [there is this] critical value, certain fluctuations are amplified and give rise to a macroscopic current. A new molecular order appears that basically corresponds to a giant fluctuation stabilized by the exchange of energy with the outside world. This is the order characterized by the occurrence of what are called ‘dissipative structures.’” (Pg. 89-90)
Later, he adds, “far from equilibrium, chemical systems may lead to dissipative structures… these structures are very sensitive to global features such as the size and form of the system, the boundary conditions imposed on its surface, and so forth. All these features influence in a decisive way the type of instabilities that lead to dissipative structures.” (Pg. 103)
He suggests, “It seems that most biological mechanisms of action show that life involves far-from-equilibrium conditions beyond the stability of the threshold of the thermodynamic branch. It is therefore very tempting to suggest that the origin of life may be related to successive instabilities somewhat analogous to the successive bifurcations that have led to a state of matter of increasing coherence.” (Pg. 123)
He reports that Ramon Margalef has stated that “ecosystems contain many more species than would be ‘necessary’ if biological efficiency alone were an organizing principle. This ‘over creativity’ of nature emerges naturally from the type of description being suggested here, in which ‘mutations’ and ‘innovations’ occur stochastically and are integrated into the system by the deterministic relations prevailing at the moment. Thus, we have in this perspective the constant generation of ‘new types’ and ‘new ideas’ that may be incorporated into the structure of the system, causing its continual evolution.” (Pg. 128)
He explains, “In general, fluctuations play a minor role in macroscopic physics, appearing only as small corrections that may be neglected if the system is sufficiently large. However, near bifurcations they play a critical role because there the fluctuation drives the average. This is the very meaning of the concept of ‘order through fluctuations’…” (Pg. 132)
He asserts, “Irreversibility is the manifestation on a macroscopic scale of ‘randomness’ on a microscopic scale… This is probably the most intriguing conclusion to be drawn in this book: although in physics time was always a mere label associated with trajectories or wave packets, here time emerges with a completely new meaning associated with evolution.” (Pg. 176)
He acknowledges, “The interesting point is that, in agreement with the expected generality of the second law, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, at least in the linear range, can now be derived from a statistical theory independently of any assumption concerning the density of the system. Important problems still remain unsolved. We do not know if the second law applies to gravitational interactions. Is the second law valid only for a given (or ‘slowly’ varying) gravitational state? Can we include gravitation? We are the frontier of our knowledge, but it is hoped that, as we begin to understand irreversibility in a more precise way, as a symmetry-breaking mechanism, we will soon be able to make some progress.” (Pg. 196)
He admits, “Although the distinction between reversible and irreversible processes is a problem of dynamics and does not involve cosmological arguments, the possibility of life, the activity of the observer, cannot be dissociated from the cosmological environment in which we happen to be. However, the questions, ‘What is irreversibility on the cosmic scale? Can we introduce an entropy operator in the framework of a dynamical description in which gravitation plays an essential role?’ are formidable ones. I prefer to confess my ignorance.” (Pg. 214)
He summarizes, “The role of the observer in quantum mechanics has been a recurrent theme in the scientific literature in the past fifty years… the developments described in this book point in a similar direction. Theoretical reversibility arises from the use of idealizations in classical or quantum mechanics that go beyond the possibilities of measurement performed with any finite precision. The irreversibility that we observe is a feature of theories that take proper account of the nature and limitation of observation. At the origin of thermodynamics we find ‘negative’ statements expressing the impossibility of certain transformations. In many books, the second law of thermodynamics is expressed as the postulate that it is impossible to transform heat into work using a single thermostat. This negative statement belongs to the macroscopic world… [at] the microscopic level … it becomes…a statement about the observability of the basic conceptual entities of classical or quantum mechanics. As in relativity, a negative statement is not the end of the story: it leads in turn to new theoretical structures.” (Pg. 215)
He concludes in an Appendix, “it is satisfying that the second principle of thermodynamics when interpreted as a dynamical principle in terms of the existence of the operator M requires us to give up the distinction between pure and mixed states in precisely that situation in which this distinction is expected to be physically unobservable.” (Pg. 247)
Not exactly ‘light summer reading,’ this book is nevertheless a very useful introduction to the work of this influential theorist.
Nobel-Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine wrote in the Preface to this 1980 book, “This book is about time… [A] static view of the world is rooted in the origin of Western science … At the beginning of this century, this static view was almost unanimously accepted by the scientific community … But we have since been moving away from it. A dynamical view in which time plays an essential role prevails in nearly all fields of science… How can we relate these various meanings of time---time as motion, as in dynamics; time related to irreversibility, as in thermodynamics… It is evident that this is not an easy matter. Yet, we are living in a single universe. To reach a coherent view of the world of which we are a part, we must find some way to pass from one description to another…” (Pg. xi-xii)
“A basic aim of this book is to convey to the reader my conviction that we are in a period of scientific revolution---one in which the very position and meaning of the scientific approach are undergirding reappraisal… We come, then, to the main thesis of the book… First, irreversible processes are as REAL as reversible ones… Second, irreversible processes play a fundamental CONSTRUCTIVE role in the physical world… Third, irreversibility is deeply rooted in dynamics. One may say that irreversibility starts where the basic concepts of classical or quantum mechanics … cease to be observables.” (Pg. xiii)
Later, he adds, “I wish to emphasize … that living organisms are far-from-equilibrium objects separated by instabilities from the world of equilibrium and that living organisms are necessarily ‘large,’ macroscopic objects requiring a coherent state of matter in order to produce the complex biomolecules that make the perpetuation of life possible.” (Pg. xv)
He states, “the aim of engineers constructing thermal engines has been to minimize losses due to irreversible processes. It is only recently that a complete change in perspective has arisen, and we begin to understand the CONSTRUCTIVE role played by irreversible processes in the physical world.” (Pg. 78)
He argues, “Biological order is both architectural and functional; furthermore, at the cellular and supercellular levels, it manifests itself by a series of structures and coupled functions of growing complexity and hierarchical character. This is contrary to the concept of evolution as described in the thermodynamics of isolated systems, which leads simply to the state of maximum number of complexions and, therefore, to ‘disorder.’ Do we then have to … introduce… some new principle of nature[?]… The unexpected new feature is that nonequilibrium may… lead to a new type of structure, the DISSIPATIVE structures, which are essential in the understanding of coherence and organization in the nonequilibrium world in which we live.” (Pg. 83-84)
He notes, “It came as a great surprise when it was shown that in systems far from equilibrium the thermodynamic behavior could be quite different---in fact, even DIRECTLY OPPOSITE that predicted by the theorem of minimum entropy production.” (Pg. 88) He continues, “nonequilibrium can be a source of order… this is true not only for hydrodynamic systems, but also for chemical systems if well-defined conditions imposed upon the kinetic laws are satisfied.” (Pg. 89)
He says, “we may imagine that there are always small convection currents appearing as fluctuations from the average state, but below a certain critical value of the temperature gradient, these fluctuations are damped and disappear. However, where [there is this] critical value, certain fluctuations are amplified and give rise to a macroscopic current. A new molecular order appears that basically corresponds to a giant fluctuation stabilized by the exchange of energy with the outside world. This is the order characterized by the occurrence of what are called ‘dissipative structures.’” (Pg. 89-90)
Later, he adds, “far from equilibrium, chemical systems may lead to dissipative structures… these structures are very sensitive to global features such as the size and form of the system, the boundary conditions imposed on its surface, and so forth. All these features influence in a decisive way the type of instabilities that lead to dissipative structures.” (Pg. 103)
He suggests, “It seems that most biological mechanisms of action show that life involves far-from-equilibrium conditions beyond the stability of the threshold of the thermodynamic branch. It is therefore very tempting to suggest that the origin of life may be related to successive instabilities somewhat analogous to the successive bifurcations that have led to a state of matter of increasing coherence.” (Pg. 123)
He reports that Ramon Margalef has stated that “ecosystems contain many more species than would be ‘necessary’ if biological efficiency alone were an organizing principle. This ‘over creativity’ of nature emerges naturally from the type of description being suggested here, in which ‘mutations’ and ‘innovations’ occur stochastically and are integrated into the system by the deterministic relations prevailing at the moment. Thus, we have in this perspective the constant generation of ‘new types’ and ‘new ideas’ that may be incorporated into the structure of the system, causing its continual evolution.” (Pg. 128)
He explains, “In general, fluctuations play a minor role in macroscopic physics, appearing only as small corrections that may be neglected if the system is sufficiently large. However, near bifurcations they play a critical role because there the fluctuation drives the average. This is the very meaning of the concept of ‘order through fluctuations’…” (Pg. 132)
He asserts, “Irreversibility is the manifestation on a macroscopic scale of ‘randomness’ on a microscopic scale… This is probably the most intriguing conclusion to be drawn in this book: although in physics time was always a mere label associated with trajectories or wave packets, here time emerges with a completely new meaning associated with evolution.” (Pg. 176)
He acknowledges, “The interesting point is that, in agreement with the expected generality of the second law, nonequilibrium thermodynamics, at least in the linear range, can now be derived from a statistical theory independently of any assumption concerning the density of the system. Important problems still remain unsolved. We do not know if the second law applies to gravitational interactions. Is the second law valid only for a given (or ‘slowly’ varying) gravitational state? Can we include gravitation? We are the frontier of our knowledge, but it is hoped that, as we begin to understand irreversibility in a more precise way, as a symmetry-breaking mechanism, we will soon be able to make some progress.” (Pg. 196)
He admits, “Although the distinction between reversible and irreversible processes is a problem of dynamics and does not involve cosmological arguments, the possibility of life, the activity of the observer, cannot be dissociated from the cosmological environment in which we happen to be. However, the questions, ‘What is irreversibility on the cosmic scale? Can we introduce an entropy operator in the framework of a dynamical description in which gravitation plays an essential role?’ are formidable ones. I prefer to confess my ignorance.” (Pg. 214)
He summarizes, “The role of the observer in quantum mechanics has been a recurrent theme in the scientific literature in the past fifty years… the developments described in this book point in a similar direction. Theoretical reversibility arises from the use of idealizations in classical or quantum mechanics that go beyond the possibilities of measurement performed with any finite precision. The irreversibility that we observe is a feature of theories that take proper account of the nature and limitation of observation. At the origin of thermodynamics we find ‘negative’ statements expressing the impossibility of certain transformations. In many books, the second law of thermodynamics is expressed as the postulate that it is impossible to transform heat into work using a single thermostat. This negative statement belongs to the macroscopic world… [at] the microscopic level … it becomes…a statement about the observability of the basic conceptual entities of classical or quantum mechanics. As in relativity, a negative statement is not the end of the story: it leads in turn to new theoretical structures.” (Pg. 215)
He concludes in an Appendix, “it is satisfying that the second principle of thermodynamics when interpreted as a dynamical principle in terms of the existence of the operator M requires us to give up the distinction between pure and mixed states in precisely that situation in which this distinction is expected to be physically unobservable.” (Pg. 247)
Not exactly ‘light summer reading,’ this book is nevertheless a very useful introduction to the work of this influential theorist.
September 6, 2016
very difficult to understand, despite cover claim “for the general reader with some background in physical chemistry and thermodynamics”; mainly because of advanced math and poor development
December 26, 2015
An argument that time is an operator at the quantum level, which is an extremely different approach to the standard quantum theory.
June 5, 2019
This seems like Ilya Prigogine's post-Nobel victory lap book. It claims to be written for a general audience, but, no, it's not. Prigogine is challenging the very way physicists and physical chemists do calculations, and that's not going to be accessible to a general audience. This book lays out his case in one place for chemists and physicists, and it's probably not enough to convince skeptics, but it worked for me to see a bird's eye view of his argument from outside the field. I'd say it requires at least a BS in Chemistry or Physics to read this book and recommend his other books for people who actually want to read an argument rather than deduce it from equations and figures.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews