Rolf Landauer (1975), Physical Review A 12(2), 636–638 — DOI-10.1103/PhysRevA.12.636
Standing in the record
Seeded on 2026-10-02 with the critics of Prigogine’s extremum principles, the maximum-entropy-production (MEP) literature and the fluctuation theorems, at the owner’s request to fill out the record’s coverage of dissipative structures. It was routed here because no anthology topic can hold a result in nonequilibrium physics read for itself.
Unavailable because no lawful full text could be reached, so no NOTE is
filed. The abstract makes two separate claims, and they are the substance
of Landauer’s objection to Prigogine’s programme as far as the record can
state it.
- Selection between steady states is kinetic, not local. “In bistable
systems the transition kinetics between the two locally stable states can
be altered without changing the behavior in the immediate vicinity of the
two favored steady states.” So “quantities which characterize only the
vicinity of the favored states cannot determine the most probable state”.
This bears on any extremum principle that selects among steady states.
- Read at face value, it bears on MEP, which Kleidon presents as just such a selection principle (LIT-519).
- It bears equally on an entropy-based criterion of relative stability.
- Whether the paper means entropy production in particular, and how it makes the argument, needs the text.
- Minimum entropy production fails even in a simple case. “Even in monostable linear circuits the steady state need not correspond to minimum entropy production.” The text would have to say which circuits, and which of the minimum principle’s conditions they violate.
The two claims reach different targets. The first is broader than Prigogine’s minimum principle, and is not answered by the distinction Kleidon draws between relaxation (minimum principle) and selection (MEP). If it holds, it is an objection to selection principles as such. The second is a counterexample to the minimum principle itself, and the abstract places it in linear circuits.
It should be read together with:
- Martyushev and Seleznev’s survey (LIT-520), also Deferred, which reviews MEP’s relation to Prigogine’s principle;
- Dewar’s derivation (LIT-521) and Grinstein and Linsker’s critique of it (LIT-525), the contested foundation of the selection principle the first claim would undercut.
This is not the record’s Landauer 1961 paper on erasure (LIT-328). The author is the same; the subject is not.