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The Reenchantment of Nature
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13473 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1987 |
5,179 Words |
| Author
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Renee Weber
Renee Weber is dean of the department of philosophy at Rutgers
University. |
If our senses were fine enough, we would perceive the slumbering cliff as a dancing chaos.
- Nietzsche
It was like being drawn into a vortex, the image of nature's flow that Ilya Prigogine so delights in. My first impression was one of sheer dynamic energy compressed into a man, a metaphor that seems well-suited to Prigogine, whose work revolves around the most dynamic of nature's aspects - time. His efforts, after twenty years of benign neglect by the scientific community, brought him in 1977 the Nobel Prize in chemistry, and fame as "the poet of thermodynamics."
New York City, host to the 1984 American Association for the Advancement of Science, had provided a flawless June day. Prigogine had flown in from Brussels only the night before to attend and address the gathering. Though he admitted to jet lag, I saw no signs of it. As Prigogine described "man's dialogue with nature" in his room towering above the New York maelstrom, he seemed in perpetual motion, like one of his dissipative structures. He took calls (requests for lectures are booked as much as a year ahead), saw to the coffee that was brought up, and punctuated his conversation with motion - all without slackening his pace.
Ilya Prigogine was born in Moscow in 1917, at the dawn of the Russian Revolution, and raised in Belgium. Educated in the classics, history, and philosophy, and seriously schooled in classical music, he became an accomplished pianist. But his chief focus was chemistry, which he studied at the Free University of Brussels, receiving his Ph.D. there in
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