关于耗散结构理论的一些东西_风闻

quora：Has someone ever gotten a Nobel prize for something which was later proven wrong?

有没有人获得过诺贝尔奖但是最终被证明其内容是错误的？

节选机翻：

1970 年，Prigogine 和他的合作者 Paul Glansdorff 声称发现了这样一种关系，他们称之为“通用进化标准”。据此，普里高津建立了一个宏大的“耗散结构”理论，该理论不仅适用于活细胞和生物体，还适用于城市、市场等人类组织。

1974 年，两位美国物理学家乔尔·凯泽 (Joel Keizer) 和罗纳德·福克斯 (Ronald Fox) 表明，普里高津和格兰斯多夫 (Glansdorff) 的“通用进化标准”并不真正具有普遍性。 Phil Anderson（1977 年诺贝尔物理学奖获得者）和其他人也批评 Prigogine 声称已经构建了耗散结构的一般理论。 Keizer、Fox 和 Anderson 对 Prigogine 工作的反对现在被该领域的专家认为是正确的。

众所周知，普里高津是一个迷人而有教养的人，也是一位出色的自我推销员。他的诺贝尔化学奖候选人得到了前两位获奖者弗朗西斯·克里克（DNA 的共同发现者）和曼弗雷德·艾根（测量快速化学反应的专家）的支持。克里克和艾根相信普里高津的工作为理解生命起源提供了一把钥匙。

有趣的是，在获得诺贝尔奖后，普里高津本人显然被迫接受凯泽和福克斯对其“普遍进化标准”的批评，至少在他的新著作中不再提及该标准的程度是这样。他开始为一般读者制作书籍，声称不可逆性是自然的基本属性（而不是像自 19 世纪后期玻尔兹曼的工作以来大多数物理学家所相信的那样）。凭借诺贝尔奖获得者的身份，普里高津确立了自己作为“复杂系统一般理论”大师的地位，并受到了阿尔文·托夫勒 (Alvin Toffler) 等人的盛赞。从事热力学研究的物理学家和化学家开始认为他是一个令人尴尬的疯子，但这很少被公开讨论。

理论物理学家 Heinz Pagels 于 1985 年在《今日物理》上发表的一篇书评中对这些问题进行了一个有趣而简短的讨论：http://www.fefox.com/ARTICLES/Pagels-PrigogineinPhysicsToday1985.pdf

原文：in 1970, Prigogine and his collaborator Paul Glansdorff claimed to have discovered such a relation, which they called the “universal evolution criterion”. From this, Prigogine went on to build a grand theory of “dissipative structures” which was supposed to apply not only to living cells and organisms, but also to human organizations like cities, markets, etc.

Two US physicists, Joel Keizer and Ronald Fox, showed in 1974 that Prigogine’s and Glansdorff’s “universal evolution criterion” was not really universal. Phil Anderson (Nobel Laureate in Physics for 1977) and others were also critical of Prigogine’s claim to have constructed a general theory of dissipative structures. The objections of Keizer, Fox, and Anderson to Prigogine’s work are now recognized as correct by the experts in the field.

Prigogine was by all accounts a charming and cultured man, as well as a superb self-promoter. His candidacy for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was supported by two previous laureates, Francis Crick (co-discoverer of DNA) and Manfred Eigen (an expert on measuring fast chemical reactions). Crick and Eigen believed that Prigogine’s work offered a key to understanding the origins of life.

Interestingly, after receiving his Nobel Prize, Prigogine himself apparently was forced to accept the validity of Keizer’s and Fox’s criticism of his “universal evolution criterion”, at least to the extent that he stopped referring to that criterion in his new writings. He began producing books for general audiences claiming that irreversibility was a fundamental property of nature (rather than an emergent one, as most physicists have believed since the work of Boltzmann in the late 19th century). With his status as a Nobel laureate, Prigogine established himself as a guru of the “general theory of complex systems” and was extravagantly praised by the likes of Alvin Toffler. Physicists and chemists working on thermodynamics came to regard him as an embarrassing crackpot, but this was only rarely discussed openly.

One interesting and brief discussion of these issues is to be found in a book review published in Physics Today in 1985, by the theoretical physicist Heinz Pagels: http://www.fefox.com/ARTICLES/Pagels-PrigogineinPhysicsToday1985.pdf

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