I’m currently working on a PhD in cryptography and I ran into this particular entry a few months ago while trying to wrap my head around entropy as an information theoretic concept. To be honest, it triggered a cascade of revelation that I had not felt since the last time I took psychedelics.<p>I read another article recently about the unexpectedly large role that randomness plays in embryonic development, and an idea clicked into place:<p>Life is about sustaining order amongst chaos, negentropy in a sea of entropy. But how does evolution lead to larger and larger pockets of negentropy that are capable of sustaining in increasingly hostile environments? How exactly does evolution lead to more and more “advanced” life forms?<p>Enter the magic of randomized algorithms. Randomized algorithms can often solve hard computational problems very efficiently, with the tradeoff that they have a small chance of failure. We can envision evolutionary leaps as computational problems, such as finding just the right folded protein to catalyze a particular cellular reaction. The magic of evolution is not just in building stable order, but also in harnessing randomness/entropy to solve environmental problems and then bootstrapping those solutions to solve higher level problems. Think about how just enough randomness is allowed into the process of meiosis to create perfectly functioning new humans that are wonderfully unique.<p>DNA and RNA are the non-volatile memory of the biological computer. Central nervous systems eventually reached a level of complexity that allowed them to persist memories, which opened up an even higher order problem solving mechanism. We humans have taken it even further with a cerebral cortex capable of abstraction, leading to complex language and the technology to record that language permanently.
My second LSD trip was all about this idea. The entirety of the universe heads in the direction of disorganization and life is the only process that does the opposite. Life is a tool by which the universe organizes itself. There's parallels of this idea everywhere (Father Sky, Mother Earth).<p>At least that's what I thought until I did a lot more reading over the next couple days after my trip and discarded the idea. Entropy and how life interacts with it turned out to be significantly more complicated than I thought.
In the appendix of the first Dune novel Frank Herbert has Liet Kynes say something along the lines of life being its own device for ever more efficiently making use of the energy available in a system, which in my opinion describes the relation between entropy and life quite nicely.
Interesting paradox, how life seems to get more organized and contradict the 2nd law of thermodynamics. But of course like the article mentions, the 2nd law deals with closed systems and life on earth is an open system with a constant input of stupendous amounts of energy from the nuclear fusion furnace we orbit. A human in a closed system (airtight box?) would entrop-ize pretty quickly.
Entropy fuels all chemical reactions. Atoms wouldn't be able to recombine into molecules without the entropy. The Wiki article tries to build some higher abstractions but it is simple as that.<p>No entropy (absolute zero temperature) leads to the absence of Brownian motion which consequently leads to inability of atoms to recombine and form new matter. All chemical reactions would totally stop at 0 degrees.<p>Life would not be possible without chemical reactions. Entropy is invisible fuel that powers everything and makes things tick.
I have a theory about this. To me the relationship between entropy and life was a big realisation and left me wondering why it wasn’t of greater cultural or scientific interest. Here’s what I came up with:<p>All life is preoccupied with removing free energy in order to get greater predictability over the future, and that encompasses literally everything we do in one way or another. Therefore, the theory that life reduces local entropy is not in any way useful, because it doesn’t guide us to do anything differently than we are already doing. It’s a bit similar to the anthropic principle.<p>Example: let’s say you need to clean up your room. You’ll find that even doing a very quick straightening of debris on a table will make a space feel more orderly and produce some level of satisfaction. But if you’re not the type to do that regularly, you might not bother the next time because clutter is the norm and it’s more dependable.<p>Another example: tell a businessman that life is a process which reduces entropy locally. Ok, so he has to get greater predictability over his circumstances, how to do that? More money and power. That was already taking place.<p>Thus, this theory hasn’t really taken off for lack of utility.<p>When we have a magical entropy measuring device, then yes, we can use it for all sorts of things...
Just read Carlo Ravelli's book The order of time, highly recommend. It argues that the change in entropy is the only equation of fundamental physics that knows any difference between past and future. It's the equation for time's arrow.
I recently discovered the work of Jeremy England [1] on this topic on a PBS Space Time YouTube video [2] dedicated to the origins of life. England's work dates back a few years (2012) and seems like it was an exciting advancement in the field but was also controversial. Does anyone here know the status of this line of research?<p>[1] <a href="https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4818538" rel="nofollow">https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.4818538</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcfLZSL7YGw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcfLZSL7YGw</a>
Life may not be the <i>only</i> process that works counter-entropy. There are two lines of thinking emerging that the principles we see so clearly in life may be more general and appear in abiotic processes as well... that physical systems "evolve" to transform available energy gradients into a localized increase in complexity. So evolution in a general sense is more fundamental than life, and inevitably eventually leads toward processes complex enough to be called "life".<p>One comes from the work of Jeremy England[1], who has published some excellent papers showing what he calls 'dissipation-driven adaptation', natural selection working on phsyical and pre-biological systems. Englands work is really eye-opening and I have feeling if he keeps it up he may be a likely candidate for a Nobel in physics <i>or</i> biology some day.<p>The other line comes from Adrian Bejan's formulation of what he calls the "constructal law"[2]. This describes some specific patterns according to which physical systems evolve to dissipate energy more efficiently. It seems to me that Bejan is a bit under-appreciated in academia, although apparently people have found quite a few practical applications of his ideas.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_England" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_England</a><p>[2] <a href="https://constructallaw.com/" rel="nofollow">https://constructallaw.com/</a>
I made a short film on a related topic. Check it out <a href="https://youtu.be/Bv42PQ-Xxj8" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Bv42PQ-Xxj8</a>
This reminds me of some of the more interesting thoughts I had while learning about information theory and astrophysics. Apologies for the lack of rigorous terminology, this is all stuff I’ve just thought about and never discussed.<p>The speed of light is also the speed of causality. Information can be sent out at that speed. So information sources have a sphere of expanding influence. Information that one node sends can be taken in by another node, modified, then retransmitted. This is general enough that it could apply to many contexts, but I am interested in the most general context. Information that replicates itself: memes. Is our existence creating a meme sphere? Will our meme sphere(s) collide with other meme spheres? Is this all just an unnecessarily strange way to look at things? I wish I had a firmer grasp on interpretations of quantum mechanics, since that may inform some of my questions.
Entropy, energy and life was the topic of a very interesting book I read in the last two days: “why information grows” by Cesar Hidalgo. If you are interested on this topic it’s a must read!
Okay really weird to see this come up because just a few days ago I saw a video about reductionism in science and free will, I think it was a John Searle lecture.<p>I find the idea of life as an organizing force that locally reduces entropy and 'offloads' disorder on the environment deeply compelling, and what I wondered was, does this not put a pretty big nail into reductionist scientific worldviews that argue purely in terms of bottom-up physical explanations?<p>Is there some account of life at the level of particles that could ever give a reasonable description of the behavior we observe, or is the existence of living organisms evidence of some sort of genuine top-down causality?<p>The reason why I was looking into this was the TV show Devs that toys with the idea of determinism and the idea that even though someone could look at a prediction of their future, they could not change it, and to me this made sense if the world could be purely explained in terms of bottom-up physics, but I started to scratch my head if decision making could actually go top-down.<p>Anyway slightly rambly post but if someone has a book, or essay or some other reading recommendation on this I'd appreciate it.
Universe was born pregnant with life, (C) mine, circa 2010.<p>I mean that with that huge size and so number of opportunities, "invention" of self-reproducible forms is inevitable. And so we can treat the life as yet another form of matter.<p>There are quite a lot of possible consequences of this axiom.
The recent interview with David Silver on Lex Fridman's podcast touches on this towards the end - <a href="https://youtu.be/uPUEq8d73JI?t=6081" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/uPUEq8d73JI?t=6081</a>
A chemical catalyst is an agent which lowers the activation energy for a reaction to proceed. A biochemistry professor of mine was fond of declaring life to be an <i>entropic catalyst.</i>