Life Fights Entropy
Memes on the fact that life is increasing organization in a world of increasing chaos.
Folksonomies: life entropy thermodynamics
Memes
Stones are Chaos
The difference between a piece of stone and an atom is that an atom is highly organised, whereas the stone is not. The atom is a pattern, and the molecule is a pattern, and the crystal is a pattem; but the stone, although it is made up of these pattems, is just a mere confusion. It's only when life appears that you begin to get organisation on a larger scale. Life takes the atoms and molecules and crystals; but, instead of making a mess of them like the stone, it combines them into new and mo...Despite being made up of atoms, molecules, and crystals, which are organization.
Life Emerges from the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Every species of living thing can make a copy of itself by exchanging energy and matter with its surroundings. One feature common to all such examples of spontaneous “self-replication” is their statistical irreversibility: clearly, it is much more likely that one bacterium should turn into two than that two should somehow spontaneously revert back into one. From the standpoint of physics, this observation contains an intriguing hint of how the properties of self-replicators must be constr...Hypothesis that life is the result of needing to dissipate energy that builds up.
Life is "Enclaves" in a Whirlpool of Chaos
THE FOLLOWING IS QUOTED FROM BERGAN EVANS ON NORBERT WEINER, NUCLEAR PHYSICIST The second concept Wiener has to establish is that of entropy. Probability is a mathematical concept, coming from statistics. Entropy comes from physics. It is the assertion-- established logically and experimentally-- that the universe, by its nature, is "running down", moving toward a state of inert uniformity devoid of form, matter, hierarchy or differentiation. That is, in any given situation, less organizat...Life swirls in the opposite direction of increasing entropy in the Universe.
Life Works Against the Tide of Entropy
The harsh, demystifying light of science has left the modern biologist with one last miracle, a miracle of organization. Somehow, back in the planet's youth, molecules organized themselves into a structure that could reproduce itself. Dust quickened, and into an inanimate world came animation. All the rest has followed, the flight of the pelican, the fragrance of a baby's skin, the songs of wolf and whale. These latter developments are relatively recent and we know in a general way how they c...While everything else in the universe is trending toward disorder, life works against the trend.
Life Feeds on Negative Entropy
[A living organism] ... feeds upon negative entropy ... Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself stationary at a fairly high level of orderliness (= fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually sucking orderliness from its environment.It sucks the orderliness from its environment.
Life is Rebellion Against Chaos
Life is order, death is disorder. A fundamental law of Nature states that spontaneous chemical changes in the universe tend toward chaos. But life has, during milliards of years of evolution, seemingly contradicted this law. With the aid of energy derived from the sun it has built up the most complicated systems to be found in the universe—living organisms. Living matter is characterized by a high degree of chemical organisation on all levels, from the organs of large organisms to the small...Death is chaos.
The Chemical Decline in Energy
It is the destiny of wine to be drunk, and it is the destiny of glucose to be oxidized. But it was not oxidized immediately: its drinker kept it in his liver for more than a week, well curled up and tranquil, as a reserve aliment for a sudden effort; an effort that he was forced to make the following Sunday, pursuing a bolting horse. Farewell to the hexagonal structure: in the space of a few instants the skein was unwound and became glucose again, and this was dragged by the bloodstream all t...Levi describes with wonder the chain of events leading to an increase in entropy as energy is used up in the body.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics
There is only one law of Nature—the second law of thermodynamics—which recognises a distinction between past and future more profound than the difference of plus and minus. It stands aloof from all the rest. ... It opens up a new province of knowledge, namely, the study of organisation; and it is in connection with organisation that a direction of time-flow and a distinction between doing and undoing appears for the first time.A beautiful comment about it.
Life is Anti-Entropy
Life, this anti-entropy, ceaselessly reloaded with energy, is a climbing force, toward order amidst chaos, toward light, among the darkness of the indefinite, toward the mystic dream of Love, between the fire which devours itself and the silence of the Cold.Climbing up and dreaming.
Life as the Reduction of Entropy
During the present century a few physicists have tried to define life. Bernal, Schroedinger, and Wigner all came to the same general conclusion, that life is a member of the class of phenomena which are open or continuous systems able to decrease their internal entropy at the expense of substances or free energy taken in from the environment and subsequently rejected in a degraded form. This definition is not only difficult to grasp but is far too general to apply to the specific detection of...Definition of life as something that generates syntropy within itself while exporting entropy, and the problem with this definition as it would include fire and hurricanes as being living.