Erwin Schrödinger's 1943 lectures, compiled into the book "What Is Life?", presented two main ideas: "order through order" and "order through disorder". The first idea proposed that living beings have a mechanism to reproduce their organization, which was later found to be similar to DNA. The second idea, "order through disorder", addresses the paradox that living beings seem to defy the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy always increases. Schrödinger's answer was that living beings use energy from the sun to maintain their organization and avoid the second law, but in doing so, they increase the entropy around them.
The video explains that thermodynamics is the study of energy in its most fundamental form, and that energy only exists in two forms: work and heat. The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy always increases, and that living beings seem to contradict this law by maintaining their organization. However, Schrödinger's answer is that living beings use energy to maintain their order, but in doing so, they increase the entropy around them.
The video also discusses the concept of gradients and how nature tends to destroy any gradient that forms. The example of a hurricane is used to illustrate how nature creates organized systems to eliminate gradients, and how this process is related to the concept of order arising from disorder.
The video concludes that life is an excellent energy sink, using the energy gradient generated by sunlight to create complex life, and that life is not something, but rather a process that the surface of the planet has found to try to achieve balance and resist the injection of energy.
Here are the key facts from the text:
1. Erwin Schrodinger presented a series of lectures in 1943 on the thermodynamics of living beings.
2. Schrodinger's lectures became a book called "What Is Life?".
3. Schrodinger had two main ideas in his work: "order through order" and "order through disorder".
4. Schrodinger's idea of "order through order" proposed that life must have a specific mechanism to reproduce its organization.
5. Schrodinger predicted the existence of DNA, but did not get the details right.
6. DNA was not discovered at the time of Schrodinger's lectures.
7. Schrodinger's second idea, "order through disorder", proposed that living beings seem to disregard the second law of thermodynamics.
8. The second law of thermodynamics states that the natural tendency of the world is to go from order to disorder.
9. Living beings are structures with a high level of chemical organization and perpetuate themselves by maintaining their organization.
10. Schrodinger's paradox is the idea that living beings seem to violate the second law of thermodynamics.
11. Thermodynamics studies energy in its most fundamental form.
12. Energy only exists in two different forms: heat and work.
13. Work is all energy that can be used in a practical way to change the world around us.
14. Heat is everything else, and is the energy that can't be accurately used to generate work.
15. The first law of thermodynamics states that all energy is either work or heat, and that energy is conserved.
16. The second law of thermodynamics is the fundamental rule of energy transformation, and states that every process that does work irreversibly generates heat.
17. Entropy measures how useful a portion of energy is, and is a physical quantity that measures the disorder of a system.
18. If energy can still be used as work, entropy is low, and if little energy can be used as work and the energy is mainly heat, entropy is high.
19. Living beings consume and use large amounts of energy to maintain their internal organization.
20. Living beings increase the entropy around them, but do not violate the second law of thermodynamics.
21. Schrodinger's answer to his paradox was that the increase in entropy only applies globally, and that parts of a system can have a local reduction in entropy.
22. Living beings are not systems in terms of entropy, and have access to energy mainly from the sun.
23. Life uses energy from the sun directly or indirectly to maintain its order and avoid the second law of thermodynamics.
24. Traditional thermodynamics was not ready to deal with biology, as it was built to describe equilibrium states.
25. Life's trick for staying alive is to use cell membranes to create a difference in chemical potential, energy difference, and temperature difference.
26. The laws of thermodynamics need to be rewritten out of equilibrium to study the thermodynamics of life.
27. Nature tends to destroy any gradient that forms, and the more intense the gradient, the more complex the ways nature will find to destroy it.
28. Gradients are simply differences, variations in some quantity, such as a color gradient or a pressure gradient.
29. Nature will always return to equilibrium and eliminate the differences in physical quantities.
30. The state of equilibrium is always the state of greatest entropy.
Note: Some of these facts may be mentioned multiple times in the text, but I have only included each fact once in the list.