Life in Terms of Entropy: a Counter-Entropic Chemistry

Entropy is basically the degree of disorder. It’s considered a physical law that on average everything increases in entropy (increases in disorder, i.e. decreases in order). So things will tend toward a dissipated state of lowest energy. This would mean low to no kinetic and potential energy. Along a path of least resistance to no resistance. This is basically the future of the universe: everything spread out and cold, as uniform as allowed. This sounds like the opposite of life, if not a starkest of contrasts.

I’d be willing to say life is anti-entropy, or at least a profound rebel of the law of entropy. Life is a conglomerate of matter and energy in a haphazard, defiant, over-organized state, following a an overall path of high-resistance. Like an eddy of order in a swift-moving river of entropy.

Life is highly ordered and so perpetuates further order. It will re-order matter back to this complex form if it’s matter tries to increase it’s entropy (i.e. decomposition is just re-composition). Life mass does this through the many catabolic and anabolic processes of metabolism and reproduction (i.e. break-down to smaller units, small units arranged to larger, organized and compiled into yet another anti-entropy entity — it feints entropy just to make something even more ordered). This is a ridiculously remarkable performance in defiance of entropy

In the grand scheme, over time our life forms and planet will entropize away with the energy density’s drive towards absolute equilibrium. Really, anti-entropy requires energy input such as stars to maintain it’s stance of order in a disordering world. There is no paradox: entropy allows eddies of counter-entropy as an epiphenomenon of greater entropic certainty.

In the end entropy is all there is. Ordered systems are just fleeting flux in a universe – on average and in conclusion – ultimately uniform. Some call it heat death; I like to think of it as hope for birth (and if needed, call it heat birth). This is a unverifiable hope that pure disorder may – by some universal law – collapse back into order, giving birth to a new universe: an ordering(life-inclusive) universe.