Erwin Schrödinger's phrase "life feeds on negative entropy" comes from his famous 1944 book "What Is Life?" In this book, Schrödinger explored the relationship between physics, thermodynamics, and biology, attempting to provide a physical understanding of the principles underlying biological systems.
Entropy is a concept from thermodynamics that represents the measure of disorder or randomness in a system. Negative entropy, which Schrödinger referred to as "negentropy," implies a decrease in disorder or an increase in order within a system. In other words, it's the tendency of a system to become more organized.
Schrödinger argued that living organisms maintain their internal structure and order (which is contrary to the natural tendency of the universe to move towards higher entropy) by extracting energy from their environment and using it to perform work that increases the order within the organism. This concept of negentropy being a crucial aspect of life's processes is what he meant by "life feeds on negative entropy."
He proposed that living organisms are able to achieve this by creating a separation between their internal processes (which have a high degree of order) and their external environment (which tends towards disorder). This separation allows organisms to maintain their internal organization and resist the tendency of entropy increase.
It's important to note that while Schrödinger's ideas were groundbreaking and contributed to the understanding of the relationship between physics and biology, they are also somewhat simplified and metaphorical. The concept of "life feeding on negative entropy" captures the idea that living systems maintain their structure and order by harnessing energy from their surroundings, but the actual biological processes are much more complex and involve a range of biochemical and physiological mechanisms.
