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The Reenchantment of Nature
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# : |
13473 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1987 |
5,179 Words |
| Author
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Renee Weber
Renee Weber is dean of the department of philosophy at Rutgers
University. |
If our senses were fine enough, we would perceive the slumbering cliff as a dancing chaos.
- Nietzsche
It was like being drawn into a vortex, the image of nature's flow that Ilya Prigogine so delights in. My first impression was one of sheer dynamic energy compressed into a man, a metaphor that seems well-suited to Prigogine, whose work revolves around the most dynamic of nature's aspects - time. His efforts, after twenty years of benign neglect by the scientific community, brought him in 1977 the Nobel Prize in chemistry, and fame as "the poet of thermodynamics."
New York City, host to the 1984 American Association for the Advancement of Science, had provided a flawless June day. Prigogine had flown in from Brussels only the night before to attend and address the gathering. Though he admitted to jet lag, I saw no signs of it. As Prigogine described "man's dialogue with nature" in his room towering above the New York maelstrom, he seemed in perpetual motion, like one of his dissipative structures. He took calls (requests for lectures are booked as much as a year ahead), saw to the coffee that was brought up, and punctuated his conversation with motion - all without slackening his pace.
Ilya Prigogine was born in Moscow in 1917, at the dawn of the Russian Revolution, and raised in Belgium. Educated in the classics, history, and philosophy, and seriously schooled in classical music, he became an accomplished pianist. But his chief focus was chemistry, which he studied at the Free University of Brussels, receiving his Ph.D. there in 1941.
He had concentrated in thermodynamics, the interface between physics and chemistry which deals with the relationship between mechanical energy and heat. From the beginning, his main interest lay in the concept of time: its structure, its meaning, and its neglect by classical physics. This was to turn into his life-long preoccupation with the dynamic processes in nature, encompassing such diverse areas as cosmology, particle physics, and biology. His Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded mainly for Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures, which built a bridge between living and non-living systems. But his prize citation also acknowledged the wide implications of his work for other areas. In the Nobel Committee's words, "Prigogine has fundamentally transformed and revised the science of irreversible thermodynamics. He has given it new relevance and created theories to bridge the
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