ABSTRACT
Introduction What is life? Erwin Schrödinger, Nobel laureate in physics 1933, tackled this old-lived question and defi ned life as the organization that maintains complex structure and heritable information in expense of “negentropy” (Schrödinger 1944). Negentropy is a useful conceptual tool to understand the physical basis underlying sustenance of biological machinery, and is the counter concept of entropy defi ned by the second principle of
thermodynamics, i.e., the time arrow theory. According to the principle, total amount of available energy, or energy, decreases irreversibly with time, and entropy is a measure of the ever-increasing unavailability partly as heat. Local entropy within a system may decrease in the expense of potential energy, i.e., negentropy, and such situation is substantiated in living organisms that expend chemical potential energy to maintain their structure and information. Heat, the energy-in-transit, does not directly support life by itself, but it may generate chemical potential energy via thermochemical reactions.
