Hans Christian Öttinger is Professor of Polymer Physics at the ETH Zürich. His main research interest is in developing a general framework of nonequilibrium thermodynamics as a tool for describing dissipative classical and quantum systems. He is the author of Stochastic Processes in Polymeric Fluids (1996), Beyond Equilibrium Thermodynamics (2005) and A Philosophical Approach to Quantum Field Theory (Cambridge, 2017).