four-limbed starfish
by Mark Gilbert
swimming against the tide
entropy machine
Nobel Prize-winning Theoretical Physicist Ernest Schrödinger (1887-1961), now famous for his cat (thought experiment), wrote a book called What Is Life? which tried to put biology into the context of Physics. Published in 1944, it predicted how genetic material would be stored in living things and stimulated the elucidation of DNA’s role nine years later.
The book also addressed the paradox that life, known to be exceedingly complex and ordered, seems to contradict the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the amount of disorder in an isolated system, its entropy, cannot decrease but tends to increase over time. One way around this paradox is to argue how ‘system’ is defined. But whatever their environment, all life forms appear to create order while increasing the disorder around them, for example by generating heat or other forms of waste. If they create more disorder than order then the Second Law would not be infringed, as Schrödinger hypothesised.
In traditional Physics, only simple systems in equilibrium were considered; however, life forms may be regarded as non-equilibrium systems. Some scientists have attempted to incorporate information theory into such ideas, complicating the concepts further, but I am sceptical of these anthropocentric approaches. As entropy cannot be directly observed or measured but must be estimated, there is room for discussion and further research, mostly theoretical, to keep scientists happy.
Further reading:
‘What is Life?’, Wikipedia article, available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Life%3F
‘Entropy’, Wikipedia article, available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
‘Entropy in Thermodynamics and Information Theory’, Wikipedia article, available: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_in_thermodynamics_and_information_theory
Author bio:
Originally a chemist, Mark Gilbert is based in the UK and enjoys writing short poetry and prose, which regularly appears in on-line and print journals and anthologies. With Eavonka Ettinger, he co-wrote Variations on the Planets, an astronomical poetry chapbook (Nun Prophet Press/Amazon). He is on Twitter at @MarkgZero.
Read another sciku by Mark here: ‘One-Word Haiku’.