Michael Polanyi FRS[1] (/poʊˈlænji/ poh-LAN-yee; Hungarian: Polányi Mihály; 11 March 1891 – 22 February 1976) was a Hungarian-British[2] polymath, who made important theoretical contributions to physical chemistry, economics, and philosophy.

His older brother was Karl Polanyi, the political economist and anthropologist, and his niece was Eva Zeisel, a world-renowned ceramist.

His research, which was encouraged by Albert Einstein, and supervised by Gusztáv Buchböck [hu], and in 1919 the Royal University of Pest awarded him a doctorate.

When the Hungarian Soviet Republic was overthrown, Polanyi emigrated to Karlsruhe in Germany, and was invited by Fritz Haber to join the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Faserstoffchemie (fiber chemistry) in Berlin.

From June 1944 to 1947, Polanyi participated in the activities of The Moot, a Christian discussion circle concerned with shaping the post-war society, at the invitation of Karl Mannheim and J. H.

[9] Polanyi's scientific interests were extremely diverse, including work in chemical kinetics, x-ray diffraction, and the adsorption of gases at solid surfaces.

In 1934, Polanyi, at about the same time as G. I. Taylor and Egon Orowan, realised that the plastic deformation of ductile materials could be explained in terms of the theory of dislocations developed by Vito Volterra in 1905.

In 1936, as a consequence of an invitation to give lectures for the Ministry of Heavy Industry in the USSR, Polanyi met Bukharin, who told him that in socialist societies all scientific research is directed to accord with the needs of the latest Five Year Plan.

Polanyi noted what had happened to the study of genetics in the Soviet Union once the doctrines of Trofim Lysenko had gained the backing of the State.

Demands in Britain, for example by the Marxist John Desmond Bernal, for centrally planned scientific research led Polanyi to defend the claim that science requires free debate.

In a series of articles, re-published in The Contempt of Freedom (1940) and The Logic of Liberty (1951), Polanyi claimed that co-operation amongst scientists is analogous to the way agents co-ordinate themselves within a free market.

Just as consumers in a free market determine the value of products, science is a spontaneous order that arises as a consequence of open debate amongst specialists.

Science (contrary to the claims of Bukharin) flourishes when scientists have the liberty to pursue truth as an end in itself:[10] [S]cientists, freely making their own choice of problems and pursuing them in the light of their own personal judgment, are in fact co-operating as members of a closely knit organization.Such self-co-ordination of independent initiatives leads to a joint result which is unpremeditated by any of those who bring it about.Any attempt to organize the group ... under a single authority would eliminate their independent initiatives, and thus reduce their joint effectiveness to that of the single person directing them from the centre.

He derived the phrase spontaneous order from Gestalt psychology, and it was adopted by the classical liberal economist Friederich Hayek, although the concept can be traced back to at least Adam Smith.

Polanyi unlike Hayek argued that there are higher and lower forms of spontaneous order, and he asserted that defending scientific inquiry on utilitarian or sceptical grounds undermined the practice of science.

But it is not enough for the members of a free society to believe that ideals such as truth, justice, and beauty, are not simply subjective, they also have to accept that they transcend our ability to wholly capture them.

Polanyi argued that the assumptions that underlie critical philosophy are not only false, they undermine the commitments that motivate our highest achievements.

Contrary to the views of his colleague and friend Alan Turing, whose work at the Victoria University of Manchester prepared the way for the first modern computer, he denied that minds are reducible to collections of rules.

In "Life's irreducible structure" (1968),[15] Polanyi argues that the information contained in the DNA molecule is not reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry.

He relies on the assumption that boundary conditions supply degrees of freedom that, instead of being random, are determined by higher-level realities, whose properties are dependent on but distinct from the lower level from which they emerge.