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Dr. Andre Duka
In a lecture at CERN of interest to both
physicists and bankers
NOBEL LAUREATE ILYA PRIGOGINE WILL SPEAK ABOUT
CHAOS AND ORDER
It may seem surprising, yet it’s a fact: when
you meet a banker or a financier in Geneva, you often learn that the person was
trained as a physicist or a mathematician. Is this a fluke or a new
trend?
Quite simply, it’s a reflection of the fact
that modern Geneva is both a major financial centre and, at the same time, a
centre for the development of fundamental physics, the only city in the world to
contain such a remarkable concentration of top-flight physicists and financiers
of the highest professional calibre. This makes Geneva a unique place, a city
that can both create new seeds of contemporary physics and apply them in the
global economy. Perhaps this is just a confirmation of Geneva’s tradition of
being at the crossroads of science and society.
On 24 January, Geneva will be privileged to be
host to a special Science & Society lecture given at CERN by Prof. Ilya
Prigogine Nobel Laureate of chemistry in 1977. One of the organizers of
Prigogine’s visit to Geneva, Dr. Allan Din, says that he is “... happy to be
involved in the organization of such a significant event. It is a source of
particular pleasure that Professor Prigogine will be giving his lecture just
before his 85th birthday as a part of the activities of the Geneva
Research Collaboration, a new structure whose participants are affiliated with
CERN, the University of Geneva, a number of local banks, like Banque Cantonale
de Genève, Lombard Odier & Cie, and private companies like Dukascopy. The
objective of the collaboration is to establish an international, open, and
creative research framework for developing and disseminating new mathematical
and physical models in social science, in general, and in finance and
environmental sciences, in particular. I’m convinced that the talk by Professor
Prigogine will help to sustain the momentum of the Geneva Research Collaboration
picked up at its start in November 2001 and that it will be oriented towards
stimulating innovative trends in modern science.”
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Ilya Prigogine (viscount), born on 25 January 1917, is a
Belgian citizen. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for work in the
field of the thermodynamics of irreversible processes, chemical oscillatory
systems, self-organization and dissipative structures. He is the Director of the
International Institute of Physics and Chemistry of the Free University in
Brussels, the Director of the Center of Statistical Mechanics and Complex
Systems of the University of Texas, a member of 70 academies and learned
societies in 21 countries and of several international organizations, an
honorary doctor of 38 universities and institutes in 19 countries, and the
recipient of 22 scientific prizes and the same number of scientific
medals. |
Einstein once
said that the experimental scientist is forced to turn to philosophy by the
conceptual difficulties of the science in which he works. Likewise, Prigogine,
starting out from chemistry – clearly a highly practical science – also came to
ask himself the philosophical question as to why the fundamental properties of
nature are as we observe them and whence they derive their multiformity.
Proceeding from a philosophical view of the problem, he carried it through to
its concrete embodiment in natural science. In this he is close to the natural
philosophers of the past. Reviving the holistic view of man and of man’s place
in nature, Prigogine must be seen above all as a strong representative of
European culture, his work a blend of faithful adherence to scholarly tradition
and bold innovation.
In 1977
Prigogine was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry “for his contribution to the
thermodynamics of irreversible processes and, in particular, to the theory of
dissipative structures”. He could have been distinguished on equally good
grounds for his research in the sphere of physics, his contribution to biology
or his services to the social sciences. The fundamental problem with which
Prigogine has been concerned, and is still concerned today, is not limited to
any single discipline. It is the problem of the so-called “arrow of time” and of
the role of chaos in the natural and social sciences.
Until the second half of
the 19th century the ideal of the natural sciences were the laws of
dynamics, which are symmetrical in respect of time (for a dynamic system, the
past and the future are absolutely equivalent). The Second Law of
Thermodynamics, discovered more than a hundred years ago, created some confusion
in the minds of scholars by proclaiming that, left to itself, a system will tend
from order towards chaos, this process being irreversible, i.e. “time-oriented”.
But the “arrow of time” and the concept of chaos did not become fully
incorporated in the natural and social sciences until the second half of the
century that has just ended. And their incorporation was wrought first and
foremost by the works of Ilya Prigogine, who showed that time-orientation is a
fundamental property of all natural systems (physical, chemical, biological and
social) and that the “natural tendency” towards chaos by no means entails loss
of harmony. Prigogine succeeded in explaining in the language of mathematics
that chaos can be constructive – that it is precisely chaos that gives birth to
the new order.
Chaos can manifest itself
both in economic (financial) systems and in dynamical (quantum and classical)
systems, where instability and unpredictability are fundamental properties. It
would seem that the fundamental significance of chaos and unpredictability in
nature gives grounds for considering the present state of the Universe to be the
result of the play of random fluctuations, especially as research by Prigogine’s
school has made it possible to describe likely mechanisms of the way in which
random perturbations in systems help those systems to choose a particular
direction of development. Had other fluctuations taken place, the Universe might
have turned out entirely different...
Prigogine’s school explains
the viability of complex structures as an ordering effect resulting from random
fluctuations of the system in the vicinity of bifurcation points. In the 1960s
and 1970s Prigogine developed the “theory of dissipative structures” he had
created and, by way of example, described the formation and development of
embryos. In his mathematical model, the critical bifurcation points are
correlated with the state in which – chaos notwithstanding - the biological
system becomes consistent and stabilized. Prigogine supposed that his theory and
mathematical models could also be applicable to social systems, including the
market.
As far back as
the beginning of his scientific activities, Prigogine undertook an analysis of
the development of science and discovered a number of contradictions. He wrote
that he had arrived at the conviction that the reason why science studies only
reversible phenomena must be sought in the fact that it is concerned with
oversimplified phenomena in which irreversibility does not play any significant
role ... It can be said that the concept of instability was, in a certain sense,
subject to benign neglect. But the truth of the matter is that the phenomenon of
instability leads to very serious, not at all trivial problems, the first among
them being the problem of prediction.
There can be no doubt that
modern science provides us with a better understanding of the mechanism of the
flow of events. For the precise sciences, “events” are bifurcations (points of
“branching” of the system’s trajectory at which it is not possible to predict
with precision what trajectory it will choose in the immediate future). Tracking
the trajectory of any system, one may find that in certain situations the
trajectory becomes less and less stable and disintegrates into a multitude of
new trajectories. The question of which direction the development will take is
the central question in the problem of prediction. In the final analysis, even
the history of mankind can be viewed as a series of bifurcations.
Prigogine writes that it
has often been objected that, by introducing uncertainty, he is allegedly
destroying the possibility of acting upon nature – that he is discarding the
attainments of technology. In reality, he says, the exact opposite is the case.
Let us, for example, take bifurcation. In an ideal case bifurcation corresponds
to two possibilities, each of which will materialize with a probability equal to
½. But as soon as you have understood the mechanism of bifurcation, you can
introduce new conditions under which only one of the two probabilities will
materialize with almost complete certainty.
Let us try to pinpoint the
aspects that are of particular importance today. First, what is needed is a
deeper understanding of the nature of time. Second, we need to study systems
whose state is far enough removed from equilibrium. When we talk about absence
of equilibrium we naturally seek to find out where and how the disruption of
symmetry between the past and the future took place. Third, we need to unerstand
the role of probability, chance and chaos. We know that points of bifurcation
give rise to a multitude of solutions. In each case, only one of those solutions
will actually materialize. His Majesty Chance therefore becomes an essential
element of the description of any system.
What, then, is the
traditional status of these concepts – time and contingency? According to the
views that have become widespread since the days of the great Boltzmann, the
irreversibility of processes is often interpreted as a consequence of our
inability to apply precise fundamental laws of physics to complex systems. In
other words, irreversibility is, as it were, a consequence of our
approximations. But thanks to Prigogine’s theory of dissipative structure we now
know that irreversibility has a constructive role that leads to a structure
including our existence. It is difficult to accept that the structure as well as
arrow of time emerges from our approximations or our ignorance. As prof.
Prigogine likes to say: «We are not parents of time but children of
time”.
The strict sciences have
traditionally found themselves at the apex of the pyramid of success precisely
because they alone were they way to reliable knowledge. This situation could not
but affect the social sciences and economics, which often imitated the strict
models of the precise sciences. Today, however, economics also successfully
borrows the model of technical analysis from physics – which, in turn, is
inexorably detaching itself from determinism. Such are the realities of
contemporary science.
The topics that will be
touched upon by the Nobel Prize laureate in his CERN lecture will, without any
doubt, be of great interest to a very wide circle of researchers. The event may
even prove to be a bifurcation point sui
generis for Geneva’s society,
inasmuch as both physicists and bankers will for the first time find themselves
forming part of the same audience. The acquisition of Prigogine’s ideas will
without doubt be important to both in the pursuit of their specific professional
goals. More and more often, modern science tends to consider random processes in
inanimate nature as well as in human society from common universal
positions.
Let us hope that, having
attended the lecture of the winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry, we may learn
something about new abstract laws of nature that may – who knows – find
profitable applications some day.
Nobel Prize laureate Ilya
Prigogine will deliver his lecture at 16.30 hours on Thursday 24 January in the
CERN auditorium.
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