Scientists find flaw in basic physical law

Press, 21 August 1979, Page 16

Scientists find flaw in basic physical law

From a special correspondent in New York

Scientists in different fields are beginning to see a possible loophole in a fundamental law of physics that has for a century imprinted a profound pessimism upon the attitudes of science towards everything from cancer research to the fate of the universe. The new and basically optimistic idea seems to show for the first time how life and even human civilisation can and must run uphill on their own in apparent defiance of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is an idea that may ultimately revolutionist science and open vast new possibilities for man in reordering his society and world. The Second Law, a classic tenet of physics, has long seemed to scientists to foredoom all long-term struggles against inevitable depletion, decay, chaos and death.

It shows that any functioning system or organisation produce's predictable amounts of entropy — an abstraction that enables scientists to measure such qualities as u-elessness, noise, confusion, decay and other elements in the process that leads to death. In a sense, that is the ultimate evil, arid life is a never-ending battle against a universally rising tide of entropy. Hints of the existence of a loophole in the Second Law have surfaced in several branches of science in recent years. For instance, chemical reactions have been discovered that spontaneously oscillate in an orderly rhythm apparently far too complex to be explained by the simple constituents of the reaction. In a similar way, orderly, hexagonal cells form spontaneously in certain fluids when heat is passed through them, disappearing instantly when the flow of heat is stopped. Such phenomena seemed unaccountably at odds with classical physics.

A fundamental explanation was found by Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian chemist who won a Nobel prize for it in 1977. Because of the scientific sensation he has caused, Dr Prigogine’s work is being closely watched by many researchers and theorists. Beyond its direct scientific applications, Dr Prigogine’s work seems to him to imply a physical principle never fully perceived before — a fundamental impetus inexorably pushing life and humanity to further evolution and complexity, for better or worse, perhaps even against man’s will. He likens this strange positive force to one he has studied intensively in the newly, discovered classes of chemical and physical reaction that seem to reverse nature by running uphill. “Each molecule in such a system must interact with its immediate neighbours through well-known, shortrange chemical and physical forces,” he said. “Each molecule knows only its immediate neighbours and its direct environment, and it acts accordingly.” That is normal. But in these new structures, the interesting thing is that the molecules also exhibit a coherent behaviour that goes beyond the requirements of their local situations, that makes them suit their behaviour to the organisation of a parent organism, which increases in complexity and grows to be something vastly different from the mere sum of its parts. “This is something completely new, something that yields a new scientific intuition about the nature of our universe. It is totally against the classical thermodynamic view that information must always degrade. It is, if you will, something profoundly optimistic.” In the simplest terms, Dr Prigogine’s complex equations show that although almost everything man has

ever observed runs downhill, there are cases in which local “open” systems can run uphill. They do so, against the general tide, by interacting with that tide, gaining vigour and complexity from its downhill slide and dumping their own decay, or entropy, into it.

Dr Prigogine calls these systems “dissipative structures” because they can dissipate their entropy into the environment with which they interact.

By reversing the usual trend towards decay, a dissipative structure “is totally against the thermodynamic view that information must degrade,” Dr Prigogine said. This fact, he added, helps explain one of the most troublesome contradictions in science — the fact that life, a very complicated chemical phenomenon, originated spontaneously from simple substances and evolved to ever greater complexity in the face of the terrible Second Law.

Since Dr Prigogine received his prize, he has extended his analysis of dissipative structures far beyond chemistry and physics. His ideas and mathematical tools have attracted a rapidly growing following of biologists, behavioral psychologists, astrophysicists, sociologists and economists.

Concerning the interest of various sociologists in his theory, Dr Prigogine said: “By itself, it will not solve the problems of our time, of course. But through it we can perhaps develop the language, the way of speaking, which may be useful for starting new things in social life, in economic life. It is part of the thinking of our time and may find many applications. “I believe in the essential unity of culture. For instance, you can see manifestations of similar ideas at the beginning of this century in the reformulation of space-time

by Einstein, the reformulation of music by Schoenberg and the reformulation of painting by Cezanne,” he said.

Other scientists believe Dr Prigogine’s ideas have the universality to reshape all of scientific knowledge, newly defining its limits and validity. With the Prigogine theory of dissipative structures, according to Steven Berry, a University of Chicago chemist “it can be possible for physicists and chemists to turn some of their attention to analysing social issues, or at least to the technologies having high social relevance, such as automative. systems or the design of buildings.” Richard N. Adams, an anthropologist at the University of Texas, said: “It is for societies and the species itself that we can use the dissipative structure as a working model.” Dr Prigogine has already demonstrated some down-to-earth applications. In an article in the journal “Science,” he and Robert Herman of General Motors Research Laboratories showed how the Prigogipe theory could be applied to predicting and controlling the flow of traffic in cities. Equations derived from the theory compare city traffic with two intermixing fluids and show the conditions under which traffic jams can be expected to suddenly appear in the midst of apparently normal traffic. But the heart of Dr Prigogine’s work has to do with the nature of existence itself. To understand it requires some knowledge of the tradition it assails.

The study of thermodynamics, a word that means the movement of heat, became a serious scientific subject at the time men needed to know more about the limitations of steam and heat engines.

It was noticed not only that machines are incapable of producing more energy than is put into them, but that every time energy in one

form is converted to another form, some of it is lost, no matter how efficient the machine that converts it. The latter fact was first recognised as a general principle of physics in 1824 by the French engineer Sadi Carnot, and was later formalised as the, Second Law of Thermodynamics. The law says, in effect, that • everything runs down as useless entropy increases. Generally, the increase of entropy in a system is irreversible. Two bags of marbles mixed together will never sort themselves back into their original bags, and the molecules of a gas allowed to diffuse among the molecules of another gas will never return to their original separation on their own. When the information in the genetic material of a living cell is blurred, the entropy of the cellular system increases and it develops chaotically as a cancer cell. As the universe transforms ■ its energy and matter into increasingly useless and dispersed forms, its entropy increases as it slides downhill to cold, dead equilibrium, in which the last star is expected to blink out 100 billion years hence. In fact, everything that happens in thj universe involves some kind of thermodynamic transaction, which accounts for the gloomy universality of the Second Law. What does Dr Prigogine’s theory do to all this? “Our work tends to show that the universe and everything in it is irreversible. You cannot reverse the evolution of the universe, even theoretically, and you cannot deduce or reproduce the past. You cannot predict its future, except in terms of scenarios that depend on a neverending series of bifurcations — crossroads in the chain of causality,” he said. “This leads to some very new conceptions of time, which was classically considered to be a kind of illusion that could at least theoretically be reversed in a

continuous causal chain. But dissipative structures show us that time is not reversible, even in theory. “The unexpected thing is that this new sense of irreversibility is a positive thing, it is optimistic, because it means evolution. It leads to fluctuations, to instabilities, and these are the driving forces in dissipative structures that produce higher orders of organisation from initially simple systems.”

It is the over-ail decline of the universe that apparently powers the uphill evolution of dissipative structures. Does this not doom the universe as a whole?

“This Is a very deep question to which I have no definite answer,” he said. “At the moment, we know from experiments that the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to the universe at short range, but gravitational effects are not well understood, we know little about the formation of black holes and so on. To speak about the universe as a whole, to call it a closed system doomed by the Second Law, that is an extrapolation that goes beyond the present limits of knowledge. But I think that the universe is not closed and that we cannot assume it is doomed by the Second Law.”

Dr Prigogine conceded that the kind of evolutionary change dictated by his theory of dissipative structures can lead to extinction as well as progress. He said: “I’m not so naive as to not recognise the staggering problems we face. But as I believe that the life is something beautiful, I see the growing size and complexity of the human race as a good thing. Now we must learn to organise that life we have created.

“Science cannot do everything, and it cannot replace political will. But I think it is important that science can now at least examine problems of good and bad for large communities — human dissipative structures. It shows what the choices are.”