Author(s)

ICHIRO AOKI

Abstract

This article contains the ceremony lecture for the Prigogine Award 2025 by the author in Ancona City, Italy in September 2025. Here, the Prigogine Award and its origin are described first. Ilya Prigogine was a great researcher in physics and chemistry and was the Nobel Prize winner in chemistry in 1977. Prigogine’s ideas are useful for the research in ecology as indicated by Carlos Brebbia, and these ideas were the reason for launching the Prigogine Award. Then, a bit of the history of ecology is described; its origin is old: ancient Greece. Aquatic ecosystems are analysed by physics-thermodynamic concepts: energy and entropy (physics is the most fundamental discipline in natural science). It is shown that entropy production in aquatic ecosystems shows a characteristic pattern: the early-up, the later-down and the transition between the two. Kleiber’s law for individual organisms is well-known as a quantitative law in biology and it was extended to ecosystems and called metabolic ecology; its present stage is described. Ilya Prigogine was also interested in cosmology. The evolution of the universe also can be explained by thermodynamics.

Keywords

ecosystems, the universe, thermodynamics, energy, entropy