Ilya Prigogine - Macroscopic Quotes

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Given my interest in the concept of time, it was only natural that my attention was focused on the second principle, as I felt from the start that it would introduce a new, unexpected element into the description of physical world evolution. No doubt it was the same impression illustrious physicists such as Boltzmann and Planck would have felt before me. A huge part of my scientific career would then be devoted to the elucidation of macroscopic as well as microscopic aspects of the second principle, in order to extend its validity to new situations, and to the other fundamental approaches of theoretical physics, such as classical and quantum dynamics.

Ilya Prigogine
The problem of time in physics and chemistry is closely related to the formulation of the second law of thermodynamics. Therefore another possible title of this lecture could have been: the macroscopic and microscopic aspects of the second law of thermodynamics

Ilya Prigogine
The probability that at ordinary temperatures a macroscopic number of molecules is assembled to give rise to the highly ordered structures and to the coordinated functions characterizing living organisms is vanishingly small. The idea of spontaneous genesis of life in its present form is therefore highly improbable, even on the scale of the billions of years during which prebiotic evolution occurred.

Ilya Prigogine
In an isolated system, which cannot exchange energy and matter with the surroundings, this tendency is expressed in terms of a function of the macroscopic state of the system: the entropy.

Ilya Prigogine