The great physicist Arnold Sommerfeld once said: "In nature, entropy plays the role of director, while energy is merely a bookkeeper." These days, the role of entropy is becoming increasingly exciting, for example because biologists have re-read the famous paper by physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who answered the question "What is life?" in 1944 with the idea of a code from which the double helix of DNA and with it molecular biology emerged.
"Cells export entropy for life"
Schrödinger was looking at a completely different matter and asked how life asserts itself against the laws of thermodynamics, which prescribe the opposite of what life wants, namely to preserve and multiply its order. Schrödinger thought that life had to deal with negative entropy to do this. This sounded dark back then and remains dubious today, but it can now be shown that cells export entropy for life - this is how the minus sign comes about - and they do this because their metabolism successfully ensures that cells stay away from thermodynamic equilibrium, which, as we know, would result in death. However, a look at the complex processes of life shows that eukaryotic cells (complex cells of animals, plants, protozoa and fungi) defy the approach that engineers would take if they had to build life (like a machine). The morphology of a complex organism and its genetic processes reveal an interplay between genetic signals from the DNA to the organs and, conversely, holistic effects in the molecular environment, in addition to the many individual steps that need to be regulated. During the construction of a cellular structure, the nature of the building blocks changes thanks to this networking. In the course of their lives, organisms are thus able to influence their environment in such a way that they can fulfill the requirements of thermodynamics with entropy. Computer scientists and computer experts are currently coming to the conclusion that these "hallucinations" can be researched by measuring "semantic entropy". A tricky procedure that prompted the authors of the relevant study to suggest that we should focus less on hallucinations and more on confabulations. Fabulating people are also more likeable than hallucinating ones. They take more pleasure in entropy and have sufficient energy, and so they enrich culture with their fictions.
