5 mins
Life “Fights Entropy”—But Not the Second Law
Life looks like it’s doing something impossible: building order while everything else drifts toward disorder. Schrödinger called this intuition “feeding on negative entropy,” but the real story is more precise—and more beautiful. Living organisms don’t break the Second Law of Thermodynamics; they work with it. As open systems, we maintain local structure by importing low-entropy resources—food, oxygen, sunlight—and exporting even more entropy to the environment as heat, waste, and diffusion. What we call “fighting entropy” is really the daily cost of maintaining gradients, repairing molecular damage, and preventing our bodies (and our lives) from sliding into the default state: harder to manage, harder to restore.