
The medal of the Nobel Prize, showing Alfred Nobel, the initiator of the prize.

The medal of the Nobel Prize, showing Alfred Nobel, the initiator of the prize.

In science, the Nobel Prize is a yearly award given to honor men and women for outstanding achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and for work in peace; the foundations of which were in 1895 when Swedish chemist, engineer, and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel wrote his last will, leaving much of his wealth to the establishment of the Nobel Prize. [1]

A number of Nobel Prize Lectures have been somewhat notable publications in the context of the hmolsciences, some of which are outlined below.

Samuelson
In American economist Paul Samuelson’s 1970 Nobel Lecture “Maximum Principles in Analytical Economics”, he alludes to his usage of maximization and minimization methods of thermodynamics, as passed on to him via his teacher Edwin Wilson (one of Gibbs’ students), commenting that “in thermodynamics the reciprocity or integrability conditions are known as Maxwell conditions [correct: Euler reciprocity relation]; in economics they are known as Hotelling conditions in honor of Harold Hotelling’s 1932 work”; he comments how in listening to Wilson’s lecture that: [2]

“My earlier formulation of the inequality in equation:

owed much to Wilson’s lectures on thermodynamics. In particular I was struck by his statement that the fact that an increase in pressure is accompanied by a decrease in volume is not so much a theorem about a thermodynamic equilibrium system as it is a mathematical theorem about surfaces that are concave from below or about negative definite quadratic forms. Armed with this clue I set out to make sense of the LeChatelier principle.”

He goes onto say, in latter discussion, that these types of thermodynamics-framed formulations are "mathematical isomorphisms" (or thermodynamic isomorphisms), not analogies, but only isomorphized equations taken from thermodynamics in outline and reapplied to economic issues, but without fundamental connection, or something along these lines. He then falls into his somewhat well-known abrasive and frequently re-quoted humor, which is difficult to surmise if it is directed in self-reflection at himself or at everyone who attempts hmolscience formulation:

“Now what in the world has all this to do with economics? There is really nothing more pathetic than to have an economist or a retired engineer try to force analogies between the concepts of physics and the concepts of economics. How many dreary papers have I had to referee in which the author is looking for something that corresponds to entropy or to one or another form of energy. Nonsensical laws, such as the law of conservation of purchasing power, represent spurious social science imitations of the important physical law of the conservation of energy; and when an economist makes reference to a Heisenberg principle of indeterminacy in the social world, at best this must be regarded as a figure of speech or a play on words, rather than a valid application of the relations of quantum mechanics.”

What is interesting about this frank and oft-quoted statement is that it is a blurry mixture of the truthful aspects common to thinkers in human thermodynamics, human physics, and human chemistry, many of which are often lost in the garden of thermodynamics, producing delusional weeds of grandeur; yet the reality that energy and entropy does, in all aspects, and without question, apply to humans, individually, and societies, economically, is not necessarily the sign of a crackpot or a "half-baked speculator in the social sciences", as he would latter comment in 1972, but is in fact reality, as capture well by the following 1999 synopsis on “The ‘Dynamics’ in the Thermodynamics of Binding” by American-born Canadian biophysical chemist Julie Forman-Kay: [2]

“Whether two molecules will bind is [completely] determined by the free energy change (ΔG) of the interaction, composed of both enthalpic and entropic terms.”

which, without change, being that this is a universal rule, can be scaled up to the human-human reaction level, to the affect that:

“Whether two people [human molecules] will bind is [completely] determined by the free energy change (ΔG) of the interaction, composed of both enthalpic and entropic terms.”

an analysis first worked out by Goethe, in terms of chemical affinities, the precursor to free energy, in 1796 (see: Goethe timeline), the principles of which he latter had to defend himself against, to a rouge women in the street, stating that the principles were in fact "true" no matter who wants to raise objection (see: best book). In short, the bondings of humans to each other in relationships, friendships, marriages, companies, corporations, cities, countries, etc., and hence the economic variables (secondary field particle exchange force quantities) used to mediate these process (reactions), are "completely" determined by the energy and entropy of the individual interactions, and hence the search for the more complete solution and formulaic presentation and or derivation of this solution is not necessarily the path of fools, but rather the path towards a deeper understanding of reality, but one blocked, to a certain extent, by the language of partial differential equations, a language very difficult in comprehension, but more importantly difficult to translate into common English explanation.


The Dual-Laureate Similarities section from American electrochemical engineer Libb Thims’ 2005 IoHT profile page, where he lists Nicolaus Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, James Maxwell, Willard Gibbs, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edger Allan Poe, Lucille Ball, James Dean, JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, and Julia Roberts, as examples. [7]

The Dual-Laureate Similarities section from American electrochemical engineer Libb Thims’ 2005 IoHT profile page, where he lists Nicolaus Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, James Maxwell, Willard Gibbs, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edger Allan Poe, Lucille Ball, James Dean, JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, and Julia Roberts, as examples. [7]

Dual Nobel Prize winners
Among individual to have one two Nobel Prizes, as depicted adjacent, namely Marie Curie, Linus Pauling, John Bardeen, and Frederick Sanger, 75 percent, i.e. three out of four, have been the product of an early parental death childhood.

Prigogine
In Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine’s 1977 Nobel Lecture “Time, Structure and Fluctuations”, he opens to an argument to the effect that “free energy”, specifically the Helmholtz free energy, does not explain or apply to people and societies: [3]

“Thermodynamic equilibrium may be characterized by the minimum of the Helmholtz free energy defined usually by: F = E – TS. Are most types of ‘organisations’ around us of this nature? It is enough to ask such a question to see that the answer is negative. Obviously in a town, in a living system, we have a quite different type of functional order. To obtain a thermodynamic theory for this type of structure we have to show that that non-equilibrium may be a source of order. Irreversible processes may lead to a new type of dynamic states of matter which I have called ‘dissipative structures’.”

Prigogine, of course, was hiding his long-standing agenda, which was to find indeterminism in deterministic thermodynamics to explain the human condition, having been inspired by the creative evolution ideas of Henri Bergson.

See also
● Nobel Prize winners in thermodynamics
● Prigogine medal
● Thermodynamics medal (proposal) - Hmolpedia: Discussion.

References
1. Alfred Nobel – NobelPrize.org.
2. Samuelson, Paul. (1970). “Maximum Principles in Analytical Economics”, Nobel Prize Lecture, Dec 11.
3. Prigogine, Ilya. (1977). “Time, Structure and Fluctuations”, Nobel Lecture, Dec. 08.

External links
● Nobel Prize – Wikipedia.
● Nobel Prize – NobelPrize.org.