Some Remarks on the Theory of Fluctuations around Nonequilibrium States

Abstract

The recent comments by Y. Kuramoto [Prog. Theor. Phys. 49 (1973), 1782] on the theory of fluctuations in nonlinear chemical kinetics developed by Nicolis and Prigogine are discussed, and an answer to his objections is supplied. Some further results about the connection between the phase space description and the usual “birth and death” type description are presented. It is concluded that these two formalisms describe, respectively, the behavior of local fluctuations and of large scale, macroscopic fluctuations. An Einstein-like formula for the distribution of local fluctuations is recovered consistently.