Ilya Prigogine Quotes

The future is uncertain... but this uncertainty is at the very heart of human creativity.

We grow in direct proportion to the amount of chaos we can sustain and dissipate

The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero.

The world is richer than it is possible to express in any single language.

The real is only one realization of the possible.

The main character of any living system is openness.

Entropy is the price of structure.

The irreversibility of time is the mechanism that brings order out of chaos.

The more we know about our universe, the more difficult it becomes to believe in determinism.

The idea of spontaneous generation of life in its present form is therefore highly improbable even to the scale of the billions of years during which prebotic evolution occurred.

It is a remarkable fact that the second law of thermodynamics has played in the history of science a fundamental role far beyond its original scope. Suffice it to mention Boltzmann's work on kinetic theory, Planck's discovery of quantum theory or Einstein's theory of spontaneous emission, which were all based on the second law of thermodynamics.

(1) irreversible processes are as real as reversible ones. (2) irreversible processes play a fundamental constructive role in the physical world. (3) irreversibility is deeply rooted in dynamics.

Now we see evolutionary trends in a variety of areas ranging from atomic and molecular physics through fluid mechanics, chemistry and biology to large scale systems of relevance in environmental and economic sciences

In far from equilibrium conditions, the concept of probability that underlies Boltzmann's order principle is no longer valid if the structures we observe do not correspond to a maximum of complexions