Harnessing Energy and Information: Time-Irreversibility of Thermodynamics

Abstract

According to Second Law of thermodynamics, the entropy of isolated thermodynamic systems can never decrease, because they unswervingly evolve toward the equilibrium, which is a state with maximum entropy. However, all the fundamental laws of physics are time-reversible and this means that the change of entropy has to be time-reversible too, yet that contradicts our observations. In keeping with the Second Law of thermodynamics, living systems “absorb”, so to speak, order from the environment at the expense of increased entropy in the latter. However, since our perception always goes with distinction and naming, anything we can distinguish has first to appear in our perception before lending itself to destruction. On this view the Second Law is a reflection of the constitutional property of our perception, in which the distinction and naming of items produce order that necessarily precedes their eventual destruction. On this conjecture any individual organism appears as a genuine, albeit transient, entropy trap. Determination of the entropy of a living system acting as a transient entropy trap is very difficult, if possible at all, because definition of thermodynamic parameters requires equilibrium conditions, whereas in living systems the thermodynamic equilibrium can be attained only after their demise. Yet it appears that under given constraints, natural selection would stabilize the states of optimal cooperation between the interdependent elements of an operationally closed living system at the fastest possible entropy production rate.