Bernard Howard Lavenda (born September 18, 1945) is a retired professor of chemical physics at the University of Camerino and expert on irreversible thermodynamics. He has contributed to many areas of physics, including that of Brownian motion, and in the establishment of the statistical basis of thermodynamics, and non-Euclidean geometrical theories of relativity. He was the scientific coordinator of the "European Thermodynamics Network" in the European Commission Program of Human Capital and Mobility. He was also a proponent for the establishment of, and scientific director of, a National (Italian) Centre for Thermodynamics, and has acted as scientific consultant to companies such as the ENI Group, where he helped to found TEMA, a consulting firm for SNAM Progetti, ENEA (Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment), and the Solar Energy Research Institute in Golden, Colorado. He has had over 130 scientific papers published in international journals, some critical of the new fashions and modes in theoretical physics.
Professor Lavenda currently lives in Trevignano Romano near Rome, is married with two adult children and two grandchildren, for whom his textbook "A New Perspective on Thermodynamics" is dedicated.
Biography
Early years
Bernard H. Lavenda was born in New York City. After completing secondary school in North Adams, Massachusetts, he attended Clark University where he graduated cum laude in 1966 with a B.Sc in chemistry. Having passed the entrance examination for the doctoral program at the Weizmann Institute of Science, he began experimental work on enzymes under the direction of Ephraim Katzir, who was later to become the President of Israel. Realizing that he was not made out for experimental work, he came under the influence of Ephraim's brother, Aaron, after reading his book Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics in Biophysics, coauthored with Peter Curran.
After the Six Days War, Aaron Katchalsky helped him secure a studentship for a doctoral degree in Ilya Prigogine's group in Brussels.
Doctoral thesis
His doctoral thesis, "Kinetic analysis and thermodynamic interpretation of nonequilibrium unstable transitions in open systems", showed that when homogeneous nonlinear chemical reactions far from equilibrium on the thermodynamic branch, which is an extension of the law of mass action at equilibrium, become unstable they make transitions to kinetic branches with lower entropy production than the thermodynamic branch.
This result was initially contested by Prigogine who reasoned from hydrodynamic instabilities, like the Rayleigh-Benard instability, which show a larger entropy production beyond the critical point in order to maintain spatial structures. Prigogine later considered these spatial structures to be produced by unstable chemically diffusing systems, based on Alan Turing's morphological models, calling them 'dissipative structures' and for which Prigogine received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977.
Prigogine later acknowledged that such transitions to lower states of entropy reduction were possible since no spatial structural changes were involved, and later incorporated Lavenda's work into a chapter of his new book Thermodynamic Theory of Structure, Stability, and Fluctuations, co-authored with Paul Glansdorff. After receiving his doctorate from the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, with la plus grande distinction, he returned to Israel in 1970 to work as a post-doctoral student in the Physical Chemistry Department of the Hebrew University. During that period he published a short note in the Italian physics journal, Lettere Al Nuovo Cimento [3 (1972) 385-390] criticizing the Glansdorff-Prigogine universal criteria of evolution which attributes an inequality to a potential which is a function only of intensive variables, the forces. He pointed out that no such thermodynamic potential could exist for it would be devoid of all information regarding how large the system is, or how many particles it contains. The inequality would be a criterion of stability, but, on account of the assumption of local (stable) equilibrium of the components that the system is broken up into, the sum of stable components can hardly become unstable. The note would probably have gone unnoticed were it not for Peter Landsberg's citation of it in his Nature review of the Glansdorff-Prigogine book [P. T. Landsberg, "The fourth law of thermodynamics"], where he predicted "the occasional lack of lucidity in the book which may give rise to some discussion within the next few years".