The Bactra Review   The Self-Made Tapestry

---

Technically, Prigogine claimed that the non-equilibrium stable state was the one which minimized entropy production, not the dissipation of free energy. The two are however equivalent under some very mild assumptions, and the less said about entropy in non-technical contexts the better. (The free energy of a system is its mechanical energy minus the product of its entropy and its absolute temperature, F = E - TS, so increasing entropy will, ceteris paribus, decrease the free energy, and vice versa.)