Prigogine's temporalization of physics: two agnostic attitudes of physicists

TL;DR

The paper investigates how physicists' underlying worldviews shape their treatment of time, using Prigogine’s career as a lens to distinguish two agnostic attitudes: naive and essential. It articulates four time-conceptions arising from dynamics and thermodynamics, arguing that the default trajectory has been spatialization—eliminating subject–object heterogeneity—while temporalization, inspired by Bergson and Prigogine, reclaims irreversibility and dissipation as fundamental. Through examples like the pitch drop experiment and the Deborah number, it links scale-dependent observation to a co-constitutive role of the observer and the observed, and situates this within a broader philosophical program involving Bergson, Deleuze, and Kimura. The work contends that temporalization offers a more dynamic, open-ended physics, with implications for the science–humanities interface and for rethinking the status of time in physical theories.

Abstract

In this paper, I aim to clarify the unconscious ideologies and attitudes held by physicists through Prigogine's work. Prigogine was an outstanding chemist and physicist who made significant contributions to the development of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. At the same time, he extended his ideas beyond physics into the humanities, engaging in an interdisciplinary exploration of scientific and philosophical thought. Due to his unique career, Prigogine's reception has been deeply divided. This study highlights his intellectual endeavors to formulate two distinct agnostic attitudes -- one held by dynamicists and the other by Prigogine himself. Building on this formulation, I examine how physics has been spatialized, drawing on the philosophy of Bergson. Finally, I explore an alternative path that Prigogine might have envisioned -- the temporalization of physics -- in a broader context to extend and revitalize his philosophy.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: The formulation of time/change. It always consists of three components, initial state $q_i$ (ice), intermediate state $q_\mathrm{inter}$ (ice with water) and final state $q_f$ (water). The line represents an abstract quantity, such as free energy.
• Figure 2: The diagram of physics based on time-symmetry, equilibrium vs non-equilibrium, linearity vs nonlinearity. Physics, based on time symmetry, is divided into dynamics and thermodynamics. Thermodynamics is further split into equilibrium thermodynamics and non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Non-equilibrium thermodynamics, in turn, is further classified into linear and nonlinear regimes.
• Figure 3: The category of the concept of time in physics. The concept of time can be classified to four based on the combination of attribution of difference, process and monotonicity. Dynamics dealt with the time lacking in difference, while equilibrium thermodynamics deal with the time without process. Non-equilibrium thermodynamics in linear regime dealt with the time with all three attributes while non-equilibrium thermodynamics in nonlinear regime deal with the time without monotonicity. You will see that difference is mediated by entropy $S$, the process is mediated by time parameter $t$, and the monotinicity is mediated by linearity.
• Figure 4: A comparison between spatialization a) and temporalization b), accompanied by schematic figures illustrating the relationship between subject/human and object/nature, along with key terms and concepts. Spatialization is static and closed in the sense that all the process of becoming has been realized to eliminate the heterogeneity of subject and object, where the virtuality has been lost. In contrast, in temporalization, these two elements are entangled (i.e., heterogeneity) as a unified event whose boundary remains open. This complicit, entangled relation to the event is represented by a circle.