"Obituaries: Ilya Prigogine from SIAM News, Volume 36, Number 7, September 2003"

“Entropy is the price of structure”

“My colleague Paul Glansdorff and I have investigated the problem as to if the results of near-equilibrium can be extrapolated to those of far - from-equilibrium situations and have arrived at a surprising conclusion: Contrary to what happens at equilibrium, or near equilibrium, systems far from equilibrium do not conform to any minimum principle that is valid for functions of free energy or entropy production.”

“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.”

“Whatever we call reality, it is revealed to us only through the active construction in which we participate.”

“The ideas of nonequilibrium order and of the search for stability extend Darwin’s concept back to the prebiotic stage by redefining the “fittest”.”

“Equilibrium thermodynamics was an achievement of the nineteenth century, nonequilibrium thermodynamics was developed in the twentieth century, and Onsager's relations mark a crucial point in the shift of interest away from equilibrium to non-equilibrium.”