Entropy and life

Research concerning the relationship between the thermodynamic quantity entropy and the evolution of life began around the turn of the 20th century. In 1910, American historian Henry Adams printed and distributed to university libraries and history professors the small volume A Letter to American Teachers of History proposing a theory of history based on the second law of thermodynamics and on the principle of entropy. The 1944 book What is Life? by Nobel-laureate physicist Erwin Schrödinger stimulated research in the field. In his book, Schrödinger originally stated that life feeds on negative entropy, or negentropy as it is sometimes called, but in a later edition corrected himself in response to complaints and stated the true source is free energy. More recent work has restricted the discussion to Gibbs free energy because biological processes on Earth normally occur at a constant temperature and pressure, such as in the atmosphere or at the bottom of an ocean, but not across both over short periods of time for individual organisms.

In 1863, Rudolf Clausius published his noted memoir "On the Concentration of Rays of Heat and Light, and on the Limits of its Action" wherein he outlined a preliminary relationship, as based on his own work and that of William Thomson, between his newly developed concept of entropy and life. Building on this, one of the first to speculate on a possible thermodynamic perspective of evolution was the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. In 1875, building on the works of Clausius and Kelvin, Boltzmann reasoned:

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