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One of the main contributions of Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977, was the understanding of the three fields of thermodynamics, that is, the thermodynamics of systems in equilibrium, near equilibrium, and far from equilibrium. This last field, which is called the complexity sciences (CC), opened the understanding of creating order out of chaos with Prigogine’s Dissipative Structures. This paper presents the basics of the CC with the perspective of Chemical Engineering, presenting its utility in unstable simple reactions and in reactive distillation. All within the framework of education and training of chemical engineers, with the view that the Sciences of Complexity, more than a tool, constitute an approach that can transform the performance of engineering and the role we engineers play in the society. 1. DISSIPATIVE STRUCTURES The concept of Dissipative Structures was proposed by Ilya Prigogine in 1930 as a consequence of unexplained phenomena found in chemical reactions, such as the production of enantiomers, or oscillatory reactions. His explanation was in terms of that far from equilibrium, nature tends to find new forms of organization that seem to be unpredictable, but that in the end by self-organization, a new ordered structure is created, dissipating energy 9 . 1.1. Stability Criteria The basic foundation for the Dissipative Structures is that, since for a system in a stationary state (that could be an equilibrium state) its entropy must not be changing in time, so that the stability under perturbation for this stationary state is determined by the nature of second order variations in entropy, that is, if the second derivative is positive, then the system is under an unstable state, and a perturbation will take it out of it. For chemical reactions, the entropy change can be expressed as: 1 For the second order change we have: Area tematica: Engenharia das Separacoes e Termodinâmica 1 1 1 For chemical reactions is convenient to use the reaction coordinate: dN ν de. For U and V constant, the expressions become: 1 Where ∑ is called the Affinity of the reaction. It may be also expressed as: ,! For the second order change in entropy: 2 # $ %& , 2 For the change in entropy after a perturbation, considering the second order term. ∆ ( ) 12 If the initial state was an equilibrium state, then the first order δS must vanish, since the entropy in equilibrium states reaches a maximum. Moreover, for the second order variation to be a stable change, must be negative, in order to be necessary an increase in entropy to come back in equilibrium, that is, for perturbations in systems under stable equilibrium: 12 1 2 , 0 To use this expression for the analysis of stationary states, is necessary to derivate with respect of time, obtaining for one simple reaction: 12 . ./ 0 0 Where A RTln R6/R8 , υ R6 ( R8 and with Rf and Rr being the forward and reverse velocities of reaction. Consider for instance the autocatalitic reaction: Area tematica: Engenharia das Separacoes e Termodinâmica 2

No abstract available.

Modern science has no basis of positivist epistemological and methodological foundations sufficient for building a comprehensive understanding of the world of man and society. A study of contrasts to the paradigms of science, technology and modern rationality expressed the thoughts of Jurgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse, Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Boaventura Santos Souza was conducted. We used a dialectic approach to highlight the contradictions and limitations of this paradigm and highlight other paradigms of positivist epistemological basis not carry that enabled the overcoming of knowledge as regulation by knowledge empowerment. It was evident, based on the theories of these authors and arguments of researchers such as Albert Einstein, Ilya Prigogine, Michel Foucault, among others, that modern science has methodological limitations Cartesian basis and fragile epistemological basis when trying to conceive man, world and society while dynamically articulated.

Globalisation, new information technology, universal networking, the nonlinearity of things, and environmental turbulence have changed strategies of managing and succeeding. This paper examines nonlinear phenomena and their practical consequences especially from an organizational perspective by using three concepts: Malcolm Gladwell’s tipping point, Ilya Prigogine’s self-organization, and Algirdas Greimas’s semiotic square. Tipping points occur at all system levels, e.g. such as determining for instance how fashion trends catch on, how health campaigns succeed, and how new ideas spread like wildfire. Self-organization refers to the kind of consciousness, action and intelligence that is manifested in the community’s rather than the individual’s actions, such as swarm intelligence in the animal world. Insight into the dynamics of change is supplemented by the semiotic square, which sheds light on how organizations can succeed. They must have buffers, a surplus of resources to which they can resort whenever something unexpected happens, and they must be attuned to change and have access to tools that promote open, confidence-building communication.

Ilya Tsvankin is a professor at the Colorado School of Mines and the director of the Center for Wave Phenomena—a research consortium. Vladimir Grechka is a senior research geophysicist with Shell, based at Houston. Through their exceptional analytical skills and keen scientific insight, both have made fundamental contributions to the study of seismic anisotropy, as well as a wide range of practical problems in geophysics. This pioneering work has been formally recognized by SEG. Tsvankin received the Virgil Kauffman Gold Medal in 1996, and Grechka received the J. Clarence Karcher Award in 1997.

During the last decades the physico-chemical conception of self-organization of chemical systems has been created. The chemical systems in natural-historical processes do not have any creator: they rise up from irreversible processes by self-organization. The issue of self-organization in physics has led to a new interpretation of the laws of nature. As Ilya Prigogine has shown, they do not express certainties but possibilities and describe a world that must be understood in a historical way. In the new philosophical understanding of nature priority is not ascribed to any single type or level of entity, but to historical processes, to processes of endless generation and change.

During a long and distinguished career, Belgian physical chemist Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) pursued a coherent research program in thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and related scientific areas. The main goal of this effort was establishing the origin of thermodynamic irreversibility (the ‘‘arrow of time’’) as local (residing in the details of the interaction of interest), rather than as global (being solely a consequence of properties of the initial singularity – the ‘‘Big Bang’’). In many publications for general audiences, he stated the opinion that this scientific research had great philosophical importance. Prigogine and his colleagues considered that the most recent stages of this research program have been successful, so that the local origins of the arrow of time are now established. There is no scientific consensus as to whether or not this claim is valid. Similarly, there is no consensus on whether the competing global (initial singularity) explanation has been proven.

This article offers a synthesis of certain essential contributions from three revolutionary thinkers of our age, C. West Churchman, Pir Vilayat Khan, and Ilya Prigogine, each of whom recently departed this life. In the course of this article, common threads in the work of these pioneers related to problem solving and creativity will be explored.

What are the cognitive mechanisms that underlie selfless conduct, both ‘thinking’ and unthinking? We first consider deliberate selflessness, a manner of selecting acts in which, in evaluating options, one expressly chooses not to weigh the potential consequences for oneself (though this formulation is seen as needing some qualification). We then turn to unthinking behavior in general, and whether we are responsible for it, as the foundation for analyzing the unthinking variety of selflessness. Using illustrative cases (Grenade Gallantry, The Well-Meaning Miner, Ignorant Ilya, Self-Disregarding Sally) we explore just what is involved in setting aside one's self-interests unthinkingly. Eventually, this account links up with work on mental compartmentalization, as it becomes apparent that unthinking selflessness encompasses both unthinking behavior (calling upon inexplicit cognitive utilization of stored images) that is selfless, and thinking behavior (calling upon reasoning with sentences) that is unthinkingly selfless (by virtue of an unreasoned, automatic shift of cognitive standpoint to a ‘compartment’ that omits information about one's self-interests). The analysis points toward a practical program for generating increased selflessness in ourselves and others.

First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews, 1938–1946by Jeremy HicksUNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS • 2013I Saw It: Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to ...

If the 20th Century was the century of physics, the 21st Century is the century of cybernetics, biology and ecology. Technological advance has both crossed new frontiers and discovered old limits. Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine broke new ground with his understanding that nature, including its human component, seeks to establish order out of chaos by “self-organizing,” not only according to pre-determined laws, but through random creative choices as well that are responsible for the endless novelty and potentiality of being. The technologically-armed purposive role of humans in the Anthropocentric Age thus takes on a new significance: “What we do today depends on our image of the future rather than the future depending on what we do today” as Prigogine puts it. “The equations of the future are written in our actions as well as in nature. Time becomes construction.” Nowhere is this truer than in the new science of genomics, which touches the soul, and in the effort to preserve the ecological balance that has enabled humanity to flourish within the narrow band of earth's livable climate. In this section we bring together leading thinkers, scientists and technologists of our age to address these issues of mankind's fate.

If the 20th Century was the century of physics, the 21st Century is the century of cybernetics, biology and ecology. Technological advance has both crossed new frontiers and discovered old limits. Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine broke new ground with his understanding that nature, including its human component, seeks to establish order out of chaos by “self-organizing,” not only according to pre-determined laws, but through random creative choices as well that are responsible for the endless novelty and potentiality of being. The technologically-armed purposive role of humans in the Anthropocentric Age thus takes on a new significance: “What we do today depends on our image of the future rather than the future depending on what we do today” as Prigogine puts it. “The equations of the future are written in our actions as well as in nature. Time becomes construction.” Nowhere is this truer than in the new science of genomics, which touches the soul, and in the effort to preserve the ecological balance that has enabled humanity to flourish within the narrow band of earth's livable climate. In this section we bring together leading thinkers, scientists and technologists of our age to address these issues of mankind's fate.

If the 20th Century was the century of physics, the 21st Century is the century of cybernetics, biology and ecology. Technological advance has both crossed new frontiers and discovered old limits. Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine broke new ground with his understanding that nature, including its human component, seeks to establish order out of chaos by “self-organizing,” not only according to pre-determined laws, but through random creative choices as well that are responsible for the endless novelty and potentiality of being. The technologically-armed purposive role of humans in the Anthropocentric Age thus takes on a new significance: “What we do today depends on our image of the future rather than the future depending on what we do today” as Prigogine puts it. “The equations of the future are written in our actions as well as in nature. Time becomes construction.” Nowhere is this truer than in the new science of genomics, which touches the soul, and in the effort to preserve the ecological balance that has enabled humanity to flourish within the narrow band of earth's livable climate. In this section we bring together leading thinkers, scientists and technologists of our age to address these issues of mankind's fate.

Arno Bohm and Ilya Prigogine's Brussels-Austin Group have been working on the quantum mechanical arrow of time and irreversibility in rigged Hilbert space quantum mechanics. A crucial notion in Bohm's approach is the so-called preparation/registration arrow. An analysis of this arrow and its role in Bohm's theory of scattering is given. Similarly, the Brussels-Austin Group uses an excitation/de-excitation arrow for ordering events, which is also analyzed. The relationship between the two approaches is discussed focusing on their semi-group operators and time arrows. Finally a possible realist interpretation of the rigged Hilbert space formulation of quantum mechanics is considered.

The fundamental problem on which Ilya Prigogine and the Brussels–Austin Group have focused can be stated briefly as follows. Our observations indicate that there is an arrow of time in our experience of the world (e.g., decay of unstable radioactive atoms like uranium, or the mixing of cream in coffee). Most of the fundamental equations of physics are time reversible, however, presenting an apparent conflict between our theoretical descriptions and experimental observations. Many have thought that the observed arrow of time was either an artifact of our observations or due to very special initial conditions. An alternative approach, followed by the Brussels–Austin Group, is to consider the observed direction of time to be a basic physical phenomenon due to the dynamics of physical systems. This essay focuses mainly on recent developments in the Brussels–Austin Group after the mid-1980s. The fundamental concerns are the same as in their earlier approaches (subdynamics, similarity transformations), but the contemporary approach utilizes rigged Hilbert space (whereas the older approaches used Hilbert space). While the emphasis on nonequilibrium statistical mechanics remains the same, their more recent approach addresses the physical features of large Poincare systems, nonlinear dynamics and the mathematical tools necessary to analyze them.

Systems of deterministic chaos demonstrate that the ensemble and trajectory descriptions of dynamics are not equivalent. This is shown through explicit constructions of the generalized spectral decompositions of the time evolution operator for probability densities. This realizes part of the long-standing goal of the Brussels–Austin groups directed by Ilya Prigogine to elucidate the dynamical foundations of irreversibility. A brief review of the main aspects of the work are given here along with a new derivation of the fractality of eigenstates in some systems and a discussion of a Lyapunov functional in an unstable Hamiltonian system. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Quantum Chem, 2004

Richard Posner and Ilya Somin have recently posed forceful versions of a common objection to deliberative democracy, the Public Ignorance Objection. This objection holds that demonstrably high levels of public ignorance render deliberative democracy practically impossible. But the public‐ignorance data show that the public is ignorant in a way that does not necessarily defeat deliberative democracy. Posner and Somin have overestimated the force of the Public Ignorance Objection, so the question of deliberative democracy's practical feasibility is still open.

We review some ideas and concepts on the irreversibility of deterministic dynamical systems that have been discussed during several years of collaboration with Ilya Prigogine and B. Misra.

We present state of the art, the new results, and discuss open problems in the field of spectral analysis for a class of integral-difference operators appearing in some nonequilibrium statistical physics models as collision operators. The author dedicates this work to the memory of Professor Ilya Prigogine, who initiated this activity in 1997 and whose interesting and most enlightening advices had gudided the author during all these years.

In this tribute to Ilya Prigogine, we refer to his fundamental presentation of the two conflicting views of nature: on one hand, the deterministic time-reversible exposition, and on the other, the evolutionary irreversible character of the universe. This consideration leads to the closely related notion of complexity or complex system calling for new perspectives concerning the description of natural phenomena. In this development, the Brussels school has played and continues to play a leading role as originator, designer, guide, and inspirator. The current contribution focuses on special issues that apply to various levels of organization, that is, starting from the microscopic arriving via the mesoscopic to the macroscopic level. We particularly confront the basic question, namely, the location of the origin, if any, of self-organization. It is argued that the emergence of generic time scales and the formulation of general nonadiabatic procedures, containing cooperative physical principles, are all interconnected. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Quantum Chem, 2004

A Christian prophecy made in the fifteenth century warned that between 1600 and 1606 the four horns of the Antichrist—cruelty, deceit, cunning and imitation of the deity—would radiate from Jerusale...

(By Yevgenia Albats and Ivan Davydov. The New Times, June 13, 2016, pp. 20 - 23. Condensed text:) Editors’ Note. - Mikhail Khodorkovsky is convinced that the opposition must run in the [upcoming Duma] elections. Twenty-four Open Russia candidates in single-seat districts plan to fight for State Duma seats. The New Times asked Khodorkovsky why [they should] participate in what many people consider a clearly no-win battle. Will this play into the government’s hands? And are the participants in this project willing to take a real risk? ... * * * ... Question. - The authorities are interested in the opposition participating in the elections - and losing. First, your opponents believe this gives the elections legitimacy. Second, it makes it possible to once again demonstrate that the Russian public does not support democrats. What are your counterarguments? ... Answer. - First, about the legitimization of the elections. It doesn’t really matter whether the liberals participate or not, since Yabloko and the Communists will run anyway. ... However, if we completely refuse to participate in elections, we lose the right to state that elections that don’t include the opposition are not genuine elections. Because they would say: Folks, how do you know in advance that you wouldn’t be allowed to run or that the ballots wouldn’t be counted properly if you don’t even try? You would counter with the fact that this was the case in 2011 [Duma elections; see Current Digest, Vol. 63, No. 49, pp. 3 - 7 - Trans.] and in the 2015 regional elections [see Current Digest, Vol. 67, No. 31, pp. 3 - 6]. However, people are not going to remember what happened a year ago; people live in the here and now. This is why it is necessary for us - and this is my second argument - to confirm every year that elections that are held in Russia are not elections; we tried [to run] and we know. ... Finally, I have a third argument, which I think is the most compelling. Today, aside from present-day Kremlin bureaucracy, the number of people with political experience is shrinking. For the most part, these are people from the older generation. There is a need for new leaders with experience in actual politics of today. Because regardless of whether the regime falls in a couple of years, as some of my colleagues think, or lasts much longer, as I think, we still need to prepare politicians who will be ready to talk to the public - to serve as the line of communication between [the people] and those who are carrying out legal, economic and administrative reforms. This is in fact the function of politicians. We have some run-of-the-mill accountants, half-decent managers and even some bureaucrats, but professional politicians are few and far between. ... This is precisely what we encountered in 1991 - and as a result, "democracy" has become almost a dirty word. How will we prepare politicians if not through elections? ... Lastly, I have a kind of postscript. You say it will be very unfortunate if the democratic forces screw up in the elections and garner an insignificant number of votes. I say it serves them right. This is the only way the democratic public will finally recognize the need for change - not only for the state, not only for the ruling class, but also for the opposition. [It will see] that there is a need for some new blood, and that the masterminds of the 1990s - and in some cases, the 1970s - are wonderful people but, unfortunately, it is not possible to win with them. ... Q. - But couldn’t that have a different effect, too: even greater apathy and internal emigration of those upholding democratic, liberal views? ... A. - You’re talking about 1% to 2% of the population: That has no electoral value. Well, some others will turn away, so we’re talking about 1.5%, not 2% - and the hell with them if they’re such snobs. The important thing is for society to have alternatives. Don’t forget that in Soviet-era Romania, 92% of the people voted for [Nicolae] Ceausescu, and three months later he was executed. In the German Democratic Republic, [Erich] Honecker got 70%, and a little later the Berlin Wall was torn down. This means that the stability of the proestablishment majority isn’t that strong. And when their wallets are empty, people need to understand that they have an alternative. I have been asked by colleagues: Name 10 young politicians you would trust to be part of a reform government. I assure you this is not a trivial task. ... [Aleksei] Navalny of the Anticorruption Fund is a wonderful, viable alternative. Khodorkovsky with his projects is a viable alternative. [Vladimir] Kara-Murza, [Ilya] Yashin and some others are viable alternatives. However, we have no access to [federal television channels], so we need to have a lot of people on our bench. Because the objective is not to replace the nonliberal Putin with a liberal non-Putin; the objective is to ensure that a coalition comes to power.

(By Oleg Kashin. Slon.ru, Feb. 11, 2016, https://slon.ru/posts/63785. Complete text:) Vladimir Kolokoltsev is the worst internal affairs minister in Russia's entire post-Soviet history. It is not easy to contend for that title against "firefighter" [Sergei] Stepashin, organized crime fighter [Vladimir] Rushailo and state security agent [Rashid] Nurgaliyev, but veteran cop Kolokoltsev has managed to do just that. The history of the post-Soviet police has seen just about everything, from Maj. [Denis] Yevsyukov1 and crooked cops to who the hell knows what else, but what we are witnessing now is unparalleled. ... Minister Kolokoltsev's personal shame is unprecedented in Russian history: It is the existence of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Chechen Republic in its current form. Its name begs the epithet "so-called," but let's not cut him any slack: By all formal criteria, it is an ordinary regional branch of the Internal Affairs Ministry, just like any of the 80-some others from Vladivostok to Kaliningrad. ... The special forces (whose training [Chechen head] Ramzan Kadyrov showed to a Vesti news correspondent, explaining that some of their colleagues have already been sent to fight in Syria [see the third feature in this issue, above]) report to Vladimir Kolokoltsev. At the time [politician] Boris Nemtsov was killed [see Current Digest, Vol. 67, No. 9 - 10, pp. 3 - 5], the people who did it reported to Vladimir Kolokoltsev. The people who covered for [Republican Party of Russia/People's Freedom Party chairman] Mikhail Kasyanov's assailants2 ([RPR/PFP deputy chairman] Ilya Yashin identified them by name and rank: Pvt. Akhmad Soltagiriyev, Sgt. Mekhdin Ismailov and Lt. Bek-Magomed Muslimov) report to Vladimir Kolokoltsev. The people who shouted "Allah Akbar" ... 1[A police chief who went on a shooting spree at a Moscow supermarket; see Current Digest, Vol. 61, No. 18, pp. 4 - 6. - Trans.] 2[Kasyanov was purportedly attacked in a Moscow restaurant by about 10 individuals who threatened him and shoved a cake in his face. - Trans.] ... in a Grozny stadium report to Vladimir Kolokoltsev. The people permanently living on a certain floor of Moscow's President Hotel and who occasionally get involved in the vilest criminal affairs report to Vladimir Kolokoltsev. ... Post-Soviet Russia has had many different kinds of internal affairs ministers - some were strong, some were weak, etc. But Kolokoltsev is the first who has had to share his name, status, title and rank on a daily basis with Ramzan Kadyrov's "Chechen army," which has been around for a long time but apparently has no legitimate reason to exist. Actually, Gen. Kolokoltsev's shameful mission is to pretend that everything is normal and that these bearded men are his fighters to whom he can give any orders. ... We hardly have the right to condemn the minister for the situation he has found himself in. The hypothetically noble justifications that could be made in defense of the status quo have long been known by heart, and the propagandists are tired of repeating them: Chechnya is a complex region, there was recently a war on international terrorism, so if you don't want war, put up with it. Who knows how Kolokoltsev rationalizes his own actions. Most likely, he understands everything perfectly well. The law-enforcement, security and military officers of his generation were brought up on two Chechen wars, and the attitudes of Kolokoltsev's milieu toward the social group once commonly referred to as Chechen fighters were formed long ago and are unlikely to ever change. Yes, he most likely knows what they are really about, but he tolerates them. Perhaps he assures himself that they are needed for stability, so that [Mikhail] Khodorkovsky and [Aleksei] Navalny don't come to power, and so that the Americans don't conquer Russia - because many in the Russian leadership actually believe someone wants to conquer Russia. They probably need this heroic myth to make it easier to tolerate the existence within the Russian Internal Affairs Ministry of someone else's private army. ... The attack on Mikhail Kasyanov, which for a second day the state media have been trying to laugh off, is not quite as frivolous as it might seem. Many have already recalled equally amusing attacks on Boris Nemtsov, which continued throughout the last years of his career: He was harassed, doused with fluids, had a toilet thrown at his car, and then was killed. And although it was Chechen Internal Affairs Ministry guys who were arrested for the murder, while the amusing attacks were carried out by young activists in Moscow, there is, of course, still some connection between the toilet and the bullets on the bridge [where Nemtsov was killed]. With the help of a toilet, the authorities' hirelings expanded the bounds of the permissible with respect to [what could be done to] opposition politicians. When those bounds were expanded, some guy with a gun was simply bound to come from somewhere: Such is the law of society.

(2003). Notes on Ilya Kabakov's ‘on the total installation’. Third Text: Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 345-352.

Ilya Gerasimov discusses implications of the project of building “a liberal empire” in Russia, which was recently introduced into the public debate by Anatoly Chubais, a liberal politician and CEO of the Russian state electric company “United Energy Systems”. This vision of a new (liberal) empire by Chubais deliberately ignores complex historical and ideological connotations of this term, particularly in the Russian context. Another peculiar trait of this latest edition of Russian ideology of imperialism consists in virtually ignoring the internal dimension of empire as a system of domestic policies, administrative structures, cultural and ethnoconfessional arrangements, and so on. The initial stage of public discussion of the project of “liberal empire” shows an alarmingly low level of expertise provided by historians and political scientists, specifically invited to comment on the Chubais’ program. The essay is based on the typescript of a recent TV show aired by the First Channel under the title “Empire for the People”.

Two theme–setting quotations introduce this essay—that of Yeats's falcon, deaf to the falconer's call, adrift in space above the blood–dimmed tide, counterpoised to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's call to abandon old nationalistic prejudices and build the earth. With primary references to the thought of Teilhard, along with, among others, to Ewert Cousins, Andrew M. Greeley, Karl Jaspers, Marshall McLuhan, Ilya Prigogine, Karl Rahner, Leonard Swidler, David Tracy, and Alfred North Whitehead, I argue that the most crucial intellectual paradigm shift of the twenty–first century will challenge humanity to take the turn from uncritical attachment to rigid absolutism or atomistic fragmentation toward a sense of open–ended, off–centered centeredness and fluid connections—from a static to a dynamic model of reality. Central to my argument is the Teilhardian reinterpretation of the Christian metaphors of creation, fall, incarnation, salvation, and the eschaton in the evolutionary terms of the emergence of cosmic consciousness from the chrysalis of the world of the past—from chaos to order, from biosphere via noosphere to theosphere. Facilitated by the exponential growth of populations, collaborative research, science, technology, and global communication (most dramatically manifested by the Internet), this emergent understanding of what it means to be human can, first, foster the awareness that in humanity evolution has become conscious of itself, and then, gradually, precipitate the formation of “the global village” (the mystical body of Christ), as respectful dialogue replaces diatribe and the dualistic pugilism of Samuel Huntington's “Clash of Civilizations” is gradually transformed into a nonadversarial mentality that values shared humanity and a common purpose. Thus, eons hence, empowered by love–energy, the transmutation of the human into the ultra–human can take the ultimate quantum leap into a yet higher dimension where spirit/energy is no longer in need of flesh/mass, and Earth can be safely left behind.

The most morally compromising episodes of Ilya Ehrenburg's career took place at the outset of the Cold War. The wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union broke down, leaving the Soviet people increasingly isolated and subject to unrelenting propaganda against Western culture and society. Ilya Ehrenburg played a double game. He became a principal spokesman in the West for the Stalinist regime, defending Soviet policies and promoting the Soviet-inspired Partisans of Peace movement. At the same time, he used his contacts to make Western literature and art more accessible to a Soviet audience.

Nonclarity around the understandingof the concept of chaos has caused someconfusion in the contemporary natural science.For instance, not making a clear distinctionbetween the deterministic and quantum chaos hasmade it impossible to evaluate the approach ofIlya Prigogine in an appropriate way. It isshown that Jean Bricmont has missed the targetin his critique of I. Prigogine's ideas, as thelatter has concentrated his interest on systemsconsisting of infinite (arbitrarily large)number of particles in incessant mutualimpact, the former on systems that have afinite (not necessarily large, althoughsometimes very large) number of particles,which move freely of any mutual impact orparticipate only in transient interaction. Thedifference may sometimes be quite crucial. Itis also suggested that if we consider theirreversibility as the basic element ofdescription of physical world, the world oftrajectories and wave functions cannot beresearched apart from this real irreversibility.

Ilya Zaytsev in his short essay discovers a life story of Moscow akhun Khayr al-Din Ageev of the 19 th century, basing on the data provided by famous Tatar Muslim scholar Ridha al-Din Fakhr al-Din (1859–1936) in his encyclopaedic historical work Athar .

Review of Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter by Ilya Somin (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013).

In 2011, at the Society for Integrative Oncology's international meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, Francis Collins, PhD, head of the National Institutes of Health, shocked the audience when he asserted that although his work in the human genome was exciting, he was more impressed by the potential represented by the National Institutes of Health's investment in the Human Microbiome Project. “This is the future,” he stated with great certainty. Surprisingly, this is also the past. More than 100 years earlier in 1908, Ilya Ilyich Metchnikov, co-winner of the 1908 Nobel Prize for Medicine, noted that “the dependence of the intestinal microbes on the food makes it possible to adapt measures to modify the flora in our bodies and to replace harmful microbes by useful microbes.”1 He coined the term dysbiosis to describe microbial ecological imbalance in the gut.

In Russian Jewish literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, works by Grigorii Bogrov and Ilya Ehrenburg have long been associated with what was referred to as "anti-Semitism", an elastic notion stretching so far as to encompass Jewish self-hatred and a blurry notion of "assimilation". Bogrov published his Notes of a Jew as a series of sketches between 1871 and 1873 in the liberal Russian monthly Otechestvennye zapiski. The journal was headed at the time by the poet Nikolai Nekrasov and provided a platform for the critical, even revolutionary Russian intelligentsia. This chapter takes its point of departure analytically from the moment of communication. Both Srulik, the first-person narrator in Bogrov's Notes of a Jew, and Lasik, his counterpart of Ehrenburg's The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz, aspire to enter and to take part in a variety of communication projects. Keywords: anti-Semitism; Grigorii Bogrov; Ilya Ehrenburg; Nikolai Nekrasov; Notes of a Jew; Otechestvennye zapiski; revolutionary Russian intelligentsia; The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz