Time, irreversibility, and the physics of what can never run backward
What the Work Is
From Being to Becoming is a book by the Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine, first published in 1980 by W. H. Freeman. It is a work of scientific and philosophical exposition rather than a textbook or a technical monograph: in it Prigogine sets out, for a general readership, the consequences of irreversible processes and self-organization for how we understand time, matter, and the laws of nature. Its subject matter, as catalogued, spans irreversible processes, entropy, space and time, and the philosophy of physics. Prigogine was, by the time of its publication, a leading figure in non-equilibrium thermodynamics; his work on dissipative structures had earned him the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, and the ideas developed in that research form the scientific backbone of this book.
What the Book Is About
The book’s central concern is the arrow of time. Classical physics, in Prigogine’s account, describes a world of reversible processes: its equations can be run backward as easily as forward, and they make no fundamental distinction between past and future. Yet the world we actually inhabit is full of processes that go only one way — diffusion, radioactive decay, the weather, the emergence and evolution of life. From Being to Becoming argues that this irreversibility is not an illusion or a mere approximation to be explained away, but a fundamental feature of nature that physics must take seriously. The title captures the shift Prigogine is urging: away from a physics of static, timeless being and toward a physics of becoming, in which time, instability, and novelty are built into the description of reality rather than excluded from it.
Key Ideas and Themes
The organizing idea of the book is that irreversibility and instability are not defects in our knowledge but genuine properties of the physical world. Prigogine draws a sharp contrast between the deterministic picture inherited from Newton, Einstein, and Schrödinger — all of whom expressed their theories in terms of deterministic equations — and a picture in which indeterminism plays an irreducible role. In the deterministic view, all of time is simply given: the future is as fixed as the past, and there is no privileged “present” marking a boundary between a determined past and an open future. Determinism, on this reading, amounts to a denial of the arrow of time. Reintroducing irreversibility restores that arrow, and with it a meaningful distinction between what has happened and what might yet happen.
A second theme is the physics of systems far from equilibrium. Prigogine’s own research had shown that when energy is imported into and dissipated within a chemical system held far from thermodynamic equilibrium, the system can spontaneously reorganize itself into new structures — the dissipative structures for which he is known. Such systems are unstable: because they are exquisitely sensitive to their initial conditions, their behavior cannot be captured by deterministic prediction and can only be described statistically, in terms of probability. This is the bridge the book builds between the abstract problem of time’s arrow and concrete physical phenomena. Instability, rather than being a nuisance, becomes the source of the self-organization and complexity we see in the world.
The book also situates these ideas within the history of physics. Prigogine traces the dispute over determinism back to Darwin, whose explanation of individual variability in terms of evolving populations inspired Ludwig Boltzmann to describe the behavior of gases in terms of populations of particles rather than individual ones. That move gave rise to statistical mechanics and to the recognition that gases undergo irreversible processes. Prigogine presents the recognition of indeterminism in unstable systems — the domain often associated with chaos theory — as the third great extension of Newtonian physics, following the introduction of spacetime in general relativity and the use of the wave function in quantum mechanics. Each extension, in his telling, loosened the grip of a fully deterministic description and made room for time and probability at the foundations.
Running through all of this is a philosophical claim about the place of human beings in nature. If the physical world were strictly reversible and deterministic, there would be no room for genuine novelty, creativity, or an open future. By grounding irreversibility in the behavior of real, unstable, far-from-equilibrium systems, Prigogine argues for a universe in which time is creative and in which the emergence of complexity — including life — is not an accident to be explained away but a natural consequence of the laws of nature themselves.
Significance and Influence
From Being to Becoming belongs to a broader current of Prigogine’s later work, in which he moved from technical thermodynamics toward philosophical questions about time, complexity, and determinism. His theory of dissipative structures had already stimulated pioneering research into self-organizing systems and philosophical inquiry into how complexity arises in biological entities and into the search for a creative, irreversible role for time in the natural sciences. The book gave that program a wide, non-specialist audience, presenting the case that determinism had lost its explanatory power in the face of irreversibility and instability. It stands as a statement of Prigogine’s conviction that the sciences of complexity require a rethinking of time itself — a conviction he continued to develop in later collaborations, including The End of Certainty, which extended the same argument about determinism, irreversibility, and the arrow of time.
Ilya Romanovich Prigogine was born in Moscow on 25 January (O.S. 12 January) 1917, a few months before the October Revolution, into a Jewish family. His father, Ruvim Abramovich Prigogine (1884–1974), was a chemist who had studied at the Imperial Moscow Technical School and owned a paint factory; his mother, Yulia Leivikovna Vikhman (1892–?), was a pianist who had attended the Moscow Conservatory. In 1921, after the factory was nationalized by the new Soviet regime and with a feeling of insecurity rising amid the civil war, the family left Russia. Following a brief period in Lithuania, they settled in Berlin, and eight years later — prompted by the poor economic situation and the creeping emergence of Nazism — they moved on to Brussels, where Prigogine received Belgian nationality in 1949. His brother Alexandre (1913–1991) became an ornithologist.
As a teenager, Prigogine was interested in music, history, and archeology, and he graduated from the Athénée d’Ixelles in 1935 with a major in Greek and Latin. His parents encouraged him to become a lawyer, and he initially enrolled in law studies at the Free University of Brussels. There he developed an interest in psychology and the study of behavior; reading about these subjects triggered an interest in chemistry, since chemical processes impact the mind and body, and this in turn triggered a more fundamental interest in physics, as physics explains chemistry. He ended up dropping out of the law faculty and simultaneously enrolled in chemistry and physics at the Free University of Brussels, earning the equivalent of a Master’s degree in both disciplines in 1939 and a PhD in chemistry in 1941 under Théophile de Donder.
War Years and Academic Rise
Prigogine began his research career under the German occupation of Belgium. From 1940 onward he gave clandestine lectures to students, and in 1941, when the university formally closed to protest the forced appointment of Flemish pro-Nazi New Order professors by the occupiers, he continued giving clandestine lectures until the Liberation of Belgium in 1944. During that period he also published 21 articles. In 1943, Prigogine and his future wife Hélène Jofé were arrested by the Germans; after multiple interventions, including by Queen Elisabeth, they were eventually released a couple of weeks later.
In 1951 he became a full professor at his alma mater; at 34 years old, he was the youngest ever full professor at the science faculty in Brussels. In 1959 he was appointed director of the International Solvay Institute in Brussels, and in that same year he began teaching at the University of Texas at Austin, where he was later appointed Regental Professor and Ashbel Smith Professor of Physics and Chemical Engineering. From 1961 until 1966 he was affiliated with the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago and was a visiting professor at Northwestern University. In Austin, in 1967, he co-founded the Center for Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics, now the Center for Complex Quantum Systems; that same year he returned to Belgium, where he became director of the Center for Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics.
Recognition and Later Life
Prigogine was a member of numerous scientific organizations and received numerous awards, prizes, and 53 honorary degrees. In 1955 he was awarded the Francqui Prize for Exact Sciences; for his study in irreversible thermodynamics he received the Rumford Medal in 1976; and in 1977 he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for his contributions to non-equilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures.” In 1989 he was awarded the title of viscount in the Belgian nobility by the King of the Belgians. Until his death he was president of the International Academy of Science, Munich, and in 1997 he was one of the founders of the International Commission on Distance Education (CODE), a worldwide accreditation agency. He received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1985, and in 1998 he was awarded an honoris causa doctorate by the UNAM in Mexico City. In 2003 he was one of 22 Nobel Laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto.
Prigogine was first married to the Belgian poet Hélène Jofé (also known as Hélène Prigogine), and in 1945 they had a son, Yves. After their divorce, he married the Polish-born chemist Maria Prokopowicz (also known as Maria Prigogine) in 1961; in 1970 they had a son, Pascal. He died on 28 May 2003.
Research Beyond the Book
Prigogine defined dissipative structures and their role in thermodynamic systems far from equilibrium, a discovery that won him the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In summary, he discovered that importation and dissipation of energy into chemical systems could result in the emergence of new structures — hence dissipative structures — due to internal self-reorganization. In his 1955 text, Prigogine drew connections between dissipative structures and the Rayleigh-Bénard instability and the Turing mechanism, and his 1977 work on self-reorganization was recognized as relevant for psychology.
With professor Robert Herman, he also developed the basis of the two-fluid model, a traffic model in traffic engineering for urban networks, analogous to the two-fluid model in classical statistical mechanics — a common problem that had attracted Prigogine’s attention some years before. His formal concept of self-organization was used also as a “complementary bridge” between general systems theory and thermodynamics, conciliating the cloudiness of some important systems theory concepts — such as entropy instead of molecular disorder, and emergence, fluctuations, and irreversibility instead of “birth and death” — with scientific rigor.
In his later years, his work concentrated on the fundamental role of indeterminism in nonlinear systems on both the classical and quantum level. Prigogine and coworkers proposed a Liouville space extension of quantum mechanics. A Liouville space is the vector space formed by the set of (self-adjoint) linear operators, equipped with an inner product, that act on a Hilbert space. There exists a mapping of each linear operator into Liouville space, yet not every self-adjoint operator of Liouville space has a counterpart in Hilbert space, and in this sense Liouville space has a richer structure than Hilbert space. The Liouville space extension proposal by Prigogine and co-workers aimed to solve the arrow of time problem of thermodynamics and the measurement problem of quantum mechanics.
Collaborations and Related Works
Prigogine co-authored several books with Isabelle Stengers, including The End of Certainty and La Nouvelle Alliance (Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature). His 1996 book La Fin des certitudes, written in collaboration with Stengers and published in English in 1997 as The End of Certainty: Time, Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature, contends that determinism is no longer a viable scientific belief: “The more we know about our universe, the more difficult it becomes to believe in determinism.” According to Prigogine, determinism loses its explanatory power in the face of irreversibility and instability. He notes numerous examples of irreversibility, including diffusion, radioactive decay, solar radiation, weather, and the emergence and evolution of life. Like weather systems, organisms are unstable systems existing far from thermodynamic equilibrium, and instability resists standard deterministic explanation; instead, due to sensitivity to initial conditions, unstable systems can only be explained statistically, that is, in terms of probability.
Among his other publications are Chemical Thermodynamics (1954, with R. Defay), Introduction to Thermodynamics of Irreversible Processes (1955, with a second edition in 1961), The Molecular Theory of Solutions (1957), Non-equilibrium Statistical Mechanics (1962), Surface Tension and Adsorption (1966, with R. Defay), Thermodynamics Theory of Structure, Stability and Fluctuations (1971, with Paul Glansdorff), Kinetic Theory of Vehicular Traffic (1971, with R. Herman), Self-Organization in Non-Equilibrium Systems (1977, with G. Nicolis), Order Out of Chaos (1984, with Isabelle Stengers), Exploring Complexity: An Introduction (1989, with G. Nicolis), Chaotic Dynamics and Transport in Fluids and Plasmas (1993), Modern Thermodynamics: From Heat Engines to Dissipative Structures (1998, with Dilip Kondepudi), and Is Future Given? (2003, papers and interviews). He also edited, with Stuart A. Rice, the Advances in Chemical Physics book series published by John Wiley & Sons, which presently runs to over 140 volumes.
The Ilya Prigogine Prize for Thermodynamics
The Ilya Prigogine Prize for Thermodynamics was initialized in 2001 and patronized by Ilya Prigogine himself until his death in 2003. It is awarded on a biennial basis during the Joint European Thermodynamics Conference (JETC) and considers all branches of thermodynamics — applied, theoretical, and experimental, as well as quantum thermodynamics and classical thermodynamics.
