Jarzynski Equality Wins Korean Prize for Connecting Physics to Generative AI Training

South Korea's government and one of Asia's leading physics institutions awarded the 2026 Lee Hwi-so Prize to University of Maryland physicist Christopher Jarzynski on Monday, recognizing the equation he derived in 1997 that brought the Second Law of Thermodynamics into the world of individual molecules — and that now underpins a growing class of generative AI training algorithms. The prize was jointly announced by South Korea's Ministry of Science and ICT and the Asia-Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics. Classical thermodynamics offers a clean guarantee: if you transform a system from one state to another infinitely slowly — a so-called quasistatic or reversible process — the work you perform equals the difference in free energy between the two states. Free energy is the thermodynamic quantity that tells scientists how much usable work a system can produce, and knowing its change between states is essential to understanding whether a chemical reaction will proceed spontaneously, how tightly a drug binds to a protein, or how a protein folds. The trouble is that real experiments are never infinitely slow. Drive a system too fast, and it falls out of thermal equilibrium. Classical thermodynamics still offers a statement in that case — the irreversible work…