I'm afraid not. I'm only repeating what my chemistry teacher taughtchownah wrote:I don't know if you are wrong......entropy is something I've not studied much........do you know of a good link that talks about life vis a vis entropy?Mkoll wrote:Correct me if I'm wrong.chownah wrote:In physics it is said that the overall condition of existence is that there is a continual decrease in the orderedness of the stuff the universe is made of..........life seems to be a process which violates that decrease......life seems to be continually taking materials with little orderliness and imposing order.
chownah
When more order is created somewhere, there is more disorder created elsewhere. So life doesn't violate the law of entropy. The energy of the universe is constant but its entropy is increasing.
chownah
I did a quick search for "entropy and life" and wikipedia was the first hit. I skimmed the article and it seems that what we're talking about is "negative entropy" proposed by Schrodinger.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_and_lifeLater, building on this premise, in the famous 1944 book What is Life?, Nobel-laureate physicist Erwin Schrödinger theorizes that life, contrary to the general tendency dictated by the Second law of thermodynamics, decreases or maintains its entropy by feeding on negative entropy. In his note to Chapter 6 of What is Life?, however, Schrödinger remarks on his usage of the term negative entropy:
"Let me say first, that if I had been catering for them [physicists] alone I should have let the discussion turn on free energy instead. It is the more familiar notion in this context. But this highly technical term seemed linguistically too near to energy for making the average reader alive to the contrast between the two things."
This is what is argued to differentiate life from other forms of matter organization. In this direction, although life's dynamics may be argued to go against the tendency of second law, which states that the entropy of an isolated system tends to increase, it does not in any way conflict or invalidate this law, because the principle that entropy can only increase or remain constant applies only to a closed system which is adiabatically isolated, meaning no heat can enter or leave. Whenever a system can exchange either heat or matter with its environment, an entropy decrease of that system is entirely compatible with the second law. The problem of organization in living systems increasing despite the second law is known as the Schrödinger paradox.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_entropy