The strange (but fascinating) idea that life is the result of entropy

How life first began on Earth remains a huge question, and scientists have some ideas about how life began, perhaps near hydrothermal vents that provided the energy needed for the chemical reactions that ultimately formed the first individual organism. It is sometimes thought of as an unlikely event, where the right mixture of chemicals combined to form life through chance and random collisions. But what if there is physics behind these reactions, guiding the existence of life?

This is part of an idea proposed by American physicist Jeremy England, who suggests that life may be the result of entropy.

Entropy is a measure of the disorder of a system. When something is in a high-entropy (or high-disorder) state, you can switch components of the system and it’ll be pretty much the same.

But in the universe, some things, such as life, exist in a low-entropy state. This may seem like a violation of the second law of thermodynamics (entropy in a closed system always increases, or everything tends toward disorder), but it’s not. Life does not violate the second law because it draws energy from the environment, expending energy in order to temporarily reduce its own entropy, just like how you expend energy to temporarily push snow into the shape of a snowman and create temporary order until entropy pushes it back again Bring back the chaos. When the entire system (including the energy of life and the heat consumed by life) is considered, the entire system continues to tend toward entropy.

This statistical law of the universe was first discovered by Rudolf Clausius, who noticed that heat flows from higher-temperature objects to lower-temperature objects, not the other way around. According to England, life and life-like structures may emerge in complex, chaotic environments in ways that better distribute heat into the environment. In other words, the emergence of life and life-like structures is a result of entropy due to its ability to distribute heat.

In one paper, England simulated a complex soup of 25 chemicals of varying concentrations and applied varying levels of energy to the system to “force” chemical reactions to occur, much like sunlight can trigger the production of ozone in our atmosphere Same thing (thanks, Entropy).

“As expected from previous theoretical work, our main finding is that the dynamically stable behavior of such systems does tend to fine-tune in response to external driving forces,” England and co-author Jordan M. Horowitz wrote in their paper . “In other words, the long-term behavior of the system enriches outcomes that can only be observed with a small probability when the entire possibility space is randomly and uniformly sampled.”

While some soups move toward equilibrium as expected, more extreme systems undergo “spontaneous fine-tuning,” rearranging themselves into more complex structures that better cope with complex environments and better distribute heat.

In the second paper, the team found more “realistic patterns of collective molecular behavior” as well as “a statistical tendency for systems to adopt structures above their equilibrium power absorption rate.” […]resulting in a highly irreversible transformation, maintaining the non-equilibrium bias of the system towards the resonance structure, because the resonance helps them obtain more work from the outside [source of energy]”.

Although this is an analogy for life and its complexity is nearly impossible to replicate, the theory remains controversial and, as always, needs more work, but the results are interesting and suggest that life may be a consequence of the laws of physics. If correct, this suggests that life may be ubiquitous throughout the universe, appearing in complex systems like our own planet.

You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it long enough,” as England told Quanta magazine in 2014, “it’s no surprise that you get a plant.