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What is Life? - Entropy
Well, Karl von Frisch starts his book on what is life
(Du un das Leben, 1949) stating that the family canary
is dead, and that Nature will make no exceptions. Father
explains to the children that the bird was old and sooner
or later it would have to die, just like the rest of us.
Grim, but true. Leucippus, the Greek philosopher, said
that "nothing happens at random, but everyhing from
reason and by necessity" (translations vary a bit,
but that is the idea).
Karl Popper published his autobiography in 1974. A subsequent
edition, which was called Unended Quest, brings a section
which is callled Debates with Schroedinger, where he reminds
us that the physicist wrote a book called What is Life?:
"In chapter 6 there is a section which begins with
the words ´What is the characteristic feature of
life? When is a piece of matter said to be alive?´
To this question Erwin Schroedinger gives a reply in the
title of the next section: ´it feeds on negative
entropy´".
Popper argues that oil-fired boilers and every self-winding
watch also feed on negative entropy, so this could not
be the characteristic feature of life. Schroedinger points
to the fact that "the device by which an organism
maintains itself stationary at a fair high level of orderliness
(= fairly low level of entropy) really consists in continually
sucking orderliness from its environment".
Gary Zukav counter-explains the fact in his book The
Dancing Wu Li Masters: "Suppose, for example, that
we deposit a drop of black ink into a glass of clear water.
Initially its presence is quite ordered, that is, all
the molecules of ink are located in one small area and
are clearly segregated from the molecules of clear water.
As the time passes, however, natural molecular motion
will cause the black ink molecules steadily to intersperse
with the clear water molecules until they are distributed
evenly throughout the glass, resulting in a murky homogeneous
liquid with no structure of order whatsoever - only a
bland uniformity (maximal entropy)".
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?>
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