Thus, according to Lovelock, to find signs of life, one must look for a “reduction or a reversal of entropy. I’d look for an entropy reduction, since this must be a general characteristic of life. When thinking about this problem, Lovelock wondered “how can we be sure that Martian life, if any, will reveal itself to tests based on Earth’s lifestyle?” To Lovelock, the basic question was “What is life, and how should it be recognized?” When speaking about this issue with some of his colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he was asked what he would do to look for life on Mars. In 1964, James Lovelock was among a group of scientists who were requested by NASA to make a theoretical life detection system to look for life on Mars during the upcoming space mission. S sum pi ln pi leq 0 The minus sign makes the entropy into. As pileq 1, ln pi leq 0 As pi is non-negative, multiplying to get pi ln pi, will still be a non-positive number. The problem of organization in living systems increasing despite the second law is known as the Schrödinger paradox. Answer (1 of 2): Consider an entropy term -pi ln pi. 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. 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. This is what is argued to differentiate life from other forms of matter organization. But this highly technical term seemed linguistically too near to energy for making the average reader alive to the contrast between the two things. It is the more familiar notion in this context. Let me say first, that if I had been catering for them alone I should have let the discussion turn on free energy instead. In his note to Chapter 6 of What is Life?, however, Schrödinger remarks on his usage of the term negative entropy: Later, 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.
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