Dissipative delusions

Lately, I’ve been reading books and papers of, and about, Ilya Prigogine, and here’s a little report. [1]

I have always been fascinated by cult leaders. The way they create wallless echo chambers—where what they say resonates with the minds of their followers. It feels unbelievable that I would fall for such rhetoric. How could any critical thinker do that? Then again, science is formed by social processes similar to those shaping our political views, religious beliefs, ethnic identities, etc. Even if rational and critical thinking hopefully safeguards science from the worst consequences of religious cults, similar phenomena do happen.

Ilya Prigogine was a Nobel laureate and an early visionary of complexity science, one of the fields I feel at home in. Over the holiday break, I read John Horgan’s “The End of Science,” which prompted a deeper dig into the writings of and about Ilya Prigogine. Horgan recounts a funny episode about an interview with Prigogine, which was more of a sermon than a dialog, was interrupted for lunch—a meal taken in the faculty club with Prigogine seated like Jesus in the Last Supper surrounded by his disciples, Prigoginians, and with Horgan coincidentally in the spot of Judas. The discussion proceeded with Prigogine completely controlling the conversation, calling for the lab members to make statements and then reinterpreting them for Horgan.

Reading Festschrifts by the Prigoginians does little to change the impression from Horgan’s story: We learn that “When Prigogine talked about thermodynamics and irreversible processes, one had the sense he understood or knew more than what his words conveyed.” Or that he pursued his scientific life goals, envisioned in his teens, “with visionary personal intuition and ironwilled determination.”

But what about the science itself? After all, he did clinch a Nobel. Now, the Nobel Prize is for “the most important chemical discovery.” The committee was unusually vague about what that discovery entailed: “For his contributions to nonequilibrium thermodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures.” What’s important about such structures, then? Well, in the words of Prigogine’s student Dilip Kondepudi “One of the most celebrated aspects of dissipative structure is explaining how patterns can form in chemical systems far from equilibrium.“

But there is a glaring logical glitch—dissipative structures are emergent patterns per definition, and thus they don’t “explain” how the patterns form. Thermodynamics shows that patterns (information, order, life, etc.) must be created far from equilibrium and incur an entropy cost. But Prigogine and his entourage reversed the causality without a flinch: “Nonequilibrium is the source of order. Nonequilibrium brings order out of chaos.” [2] … Eh. No. Nonequilibrium brings you anything and everything—order out of chaos, chaos out of order, a beer, a facepalm.

Like complexity scientists, Prigogine prophesized a new type of science, “a new rationality,” away from Newtonian laws, determinism, and certainty. But hasn’t a great deal of science been statistical all the way back to the Enlightenment? Can’t one find laws in statistics? Anyhoo, he also denounced the complexity science of the SFI crowd for the futility of searching for universal truths “One should not exaggerate and dream about a unified theory which will include politics and economics and the immune system and physics and chemistry.” [3] While at the same time having no problem extrapolating his results to pretty much anything, “One should not think that progress in chemical nonequilibrium reactions will give you the key for human politics. Of course not! Of course not! But still, it brings in a unified element. It brings in the element of bifurcation, it brings in the idea of historical dimension, it brings in the idea of evolutionary patterns, which indeed you find on all levels. And in this sense it is a unifying element of our view of the universe.” [4] Not universal, but universal.

Reading Prigogine reminds me of Per Bak and self-organized criticality. Both blew up their claims to comical proportions: “[L]ife and absence of life are just two states of matter separated by a chemical instability.” [5] Vs. “Self-organized criticality is the only known mechanism to [explain how] the universe [could] start with a few types of elementary particles at the big bang, and end up with life, history, economics, and literature.” [6] I guess the big difference was that Bak’s science was more speculative per se, so the gaps between his papers and claims were smaller, and correspondingly, the gap between reality and Bak’s model world was astronomical. Prigogine’s actual research papers seem relatively precise and mundane. [7]

Above, we saw Prigogine’s disdain for Bak’s universality claims. Anyone thinking the feelings weren’t reciprocated will be disappointed as Bak reviewed Prigogine’s The End of Certainty thus: “Every now and then, crackpot papers are submitted for publication to scientific journals. When pseudoscience is presented by a highly esteemed, Nobel prize winning chemist, the damage is not so easy to contain. Indeed, Prigogine has a great following among chemists, however, and humanistic scientists. However, as John Maynard Smith once said of a book by Prigogine: ‘If nonequilibrium statistical mechanics excites poets, so be it!'” [8] Which is hilarious, not only because Bak threw chemists into the same trash can as . . THE HUMANITIES, but also that he cited Maynard Smith, who didn’t hold Bak even an inch higher than Prigogine—”I just find the whole enterprise [of self-organized criticality—Bak’s claim to fame] contemptible.” [9]

All in all, I am ambivalent about Prigogine’s legacy (or Bak’s, for that matter). On the one hand, he definitely shook the community out of its lull and made people think in newer, grander ways. He popularized thermodynamics and the study of nonequilibrium processes and brought new minds to the topic (like I would probably not do what I am today without Bak). Then again, this type of not-really-cult-leader-but… scientist harms a field’s credibility and leaves us with believers immune to rational arguments, thus slowing down progress. [10] Well, it must have been hard to correctly judge hypes like these when they happened because they followed the format of true scientific revolutions. A warning sign, if any, should have been that they both exploited the cultural trope of deep, mysterious connections between seemingly unrelated everyday experiences.

Notes

[1] The cover illustration uses a picture of Prigogine from Wikipedia and a photo of the BZ reaction by Stephen Morris.
[2] Order out of Chaos, p. 267.
[3] IP quoted in Horgan’s The End of Science.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Not by Prigogine, sorry, but by his colleague and former student Grégoire Nicolis. And slightly out of context, the original quotation had some softening disclaimers … but, still.
[6] How Nature Works, ch. 1.
[7] Well, he states in The End of Certainty that he believes the arrow of time should exist at any level of physics (i.e., the 2nd law of thermodynamics precedes the Schrödinger equation, etc.) and apparently had a research program aiming to prove that, which seems pretty far out.
[8] Big thanks to Álvaro Corral for pointing out this fantastic quotation. 
[9] Note that many (most? all?) of the arguments Maynard Smith made in that review (of Order out of Chaos) would apply to self-organized criticality as well.
[10] I think these are a mix of people who have vested interests because they were students of the person in question and need their authority for their careers, those truly infatuated by the arguments, and those who are incapable or too lazy to adapt to science’s advance.