COMPLEJIDAD

One of the characteristics of life is that it becomes increasingly more complex. At the same time, life devises increasingly more sophisticated tools with which to gather energy from the environment.

AUTOSIMILITUD

Yet another characteristic of life is selfsimilarity: a human society has a similar structure to our own person (with a government/brain, working force/muscular system, army/immune system, etc.), which in turn has a similar structure to a unicellular organism.

EMERGENCIA

The whole is much more than the sum of its parts: what our cells can do together cannot be compared to what they would do independently.

ENTROPÍA | La energía y la información están conectadas.

La caída hacia el equilibrio.

To extract energy from a system, we need information about that system. We need to be able to predict how it will react, evolve. But to process information, in a brain, in a computer, in the DNA, we need energy. Life means storing information to extract energy, and extract energy to store information.

Erwin Schrödinger’s, one of the parents of quantum mechanics, gave this definition in his booklet What is life (1944):

Life is organized matter which evades the decay to equilibrium through absorption of energy

why do I need energy to keep all molecules of an organism together? Why if I don’t provide energy to the organism, all its molecules and atoms will eventually diffuse in the environment, like the molecules of gas in the box?

To avoid the decay to equilibrium, we need energy.

With some effort, we can move the balls from one side and put them on the other side, so to remain in a nonequilibrium state. Similarly, with some energy we keep our organism… organised, and all its molecules together.