Ilya Prigogine was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1917. His father, Roman, was a chemical engineer and his mother, Julia had studied music at the conservatory in Moscow. Although Prigognine eventually elected to study chemistry, his highly philosophical approach to science reflected his numerous interests which included history, art, music, and law. Under the direction of Théophile De Donder, Prigogine received his Ph.D. from the Free University of Brussels in 1941 with the thesis, "The Thermodynamic Study of Irreversible Phenomena." De Donder was the founder of the Brussels school of thermodynamics (the branch of physics that deals with the behavior of heat and related phenomena).

Prigogine was particularly interested in the nature of time as it related to chemistry, and was therefore attracted to a study of the second law of thermodynamics that states that any spontaneous change in a closed system (one where neither matter nor...