dvasya comments on Feed the spinoff heuristic! - Less Wrong

49 Post author: CarlShulman 09 February 2012 07:41AM

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Comment author: dvasya 09 February 2012 06:50:34PM 3 points [-]

Physicist Ilya Prigogine developed his famous theory of dissipative systems which was expected to explain a lot of things from thermodynamics of living systems to the nature of the arrow of time. It is a very well-developed and deep theory. Yet, in my scientific life, I have never seen an actual numerical calculation of a measurable quantity utilizing any of Prigogine's concepts such as "rate of entropy production". Looks definitely like a missing spinoff!

Comment author: asr 12 February 2012 08:44:42AM 1 point [-]

People do use thermodynamics. Are you in a position to say whether Priogine's work is ever relevant to professional chemical engineers?

Comment author: dvasya 22 February 2012 03:05:38AM 2 points [-]

That's the point: what people use is normal equilibrium or close-to-equilibrium thermodynamics. Even in situations that seem far out of the scope of equilibrium thermodynamics and where one would normally expect Prigogine physics to be the perfect candidate - one example being CVD or VLS growth of various nanotubes/nanowires/etc. - I have never seen the latter applied. Everybody just goes with good old (near-)equilibrium chemical thermodynamics. Now this might be just a manifestation of Maslow's hammer, and Prigogine physics is hard, but for what it's worth, here's one example of a big hole that should be covered by the theory but is, in fact, not.