In What Is Life?, Erwin Schrödinger uses entropy to explain a powerful intuition: living things look like they’re continuously creating order—maintaining structure, repairing damage, and resisting the tendency to “fall apart.”
But “fighting entropy” needs a more precise meaning.
Life does not violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics. A living organism is an open system. It stays locally ordered (low entropy / high organization) by taking in low-entropy resources (energy and relatively ordered matter) and exporting even more entropy to the environment—through heat, waste, and diffusion. The total entropy of “organism + environment” still increases.
Let’s unpack that carefully.
1) What entropy is really about: from micro-possibilities to macro “messiness”
In physics, entropy can be understood (roughly) as:
How many microscopic arrangements correspond to the same macroscopic state. More micro-possibilities → higher entropy.
In everyday language: a system has higher entropy when it can be arranged in “many more ways” without changing its overall appearance.
A classic intuition is your playing-cards example:
A perfectly ordered deck corresponds to very few microscopic configurations.
A messy pile corresponds to an enormous number of configurations.
So if you toss the deck on a table, it almost certainly becomes messy—because there are vastly more ways to be messy than to be perfectly ordered. It’s not that “the universe likes chaos”; it’s that random motion is overwhelmingly more likely to land in high-count states.
2) The Second Law is about total entropy—not “everything must get messier locally”
The key correction:
Isolated systems: total entropy does not decrease (it tends to increase).
Open systems: a subsystem can become more ordered if it exports more entropy to the surroundings, so that the total still increases.
Life is open-system behavior in the extreme: organisms constantly exchange energy and matter with their environment.
So the strict version of “life fights entropy” is:
Life maintains low internal entropy by using energy flows and material flows—and by exporting entropy to the outside world.
3) Schrödinger’s core idea: life “feeds on negative entropy” (negentropy)
Schrödinger used the word negentropy to capture a vivid point:
To stay alive, an organism must continuously “eat” inputs that support order—and continuously dump disorder outward.
A simple loop:
Input: food / oxygen / sunlight (usable energy + relatively ordered matter)
Maintenance inside: synthesis, repair, transport, gradients, information replication
Output: heat, CO₂, metabolic waste, dispersed molecules (higher-entropy outputs)
Life doesn’t “stop entropy.” It pays the maintenance bill using energy—and pushes the entropy increase outward.
4) What exactly is a living body “resisting” day to day?
If you stop supplying energy, the body doesn’t merely pause—it degrades quickly. Much of metabolism is essentially continuous anti-degradation work. You can group it into three big “default drifts”:
A. Resisting diffusion and leveling-out (keeping gradients)
Nature’s default direction is: concentrated → diluted, differences → flattened.
But cells must maintain gradients (ion gradients, proton gradients, voltage differences) or they lose:
electrical signaling,
ATP production,
controlled transport.
So organisms continuously do “anti-diffusion” work:
ion pumps that burn ATP to restore gradients,
osmotic regulation and membrane potentials.
Gradient = organization. Maintaining gradients is maintaining low entropy.
B. Resisting molecular damage and noise accumulation
Proteins misfold, DNA gets damaged, membranes oxidize, structures wear down. So life invests heavily in:
DNA repair,
protein quality control (refolding, degradation, resynthesis),
immune surveillance and cleanup.
This is why “being alive” is not a static state—it’s relentless dynamic maintenance.
C. Resisting collapse of large-scale structure
Tissues and systems regress without stimuli and resources:
muscles atrophy,
bone density declines,
metabolic flexibility shrinks.
Exercise, nutrition, and sleep aren’t “extras”—they’re part of the structural upkeep that keeps the system stable and resilient.
5) Why so many daily behaviors feel like “anti-entropy”
If we translate “entropy increase” into a life-friendly sentence:
If you don’t maintain a system, it will get worse. “Getting worse” is the default direction.
Then countless habits look like entropy-management:
Physiology
Eating: importing usable energy and ordered materials
Breathing: enabling efficient controlled energy release
Sleeping: lowering load, doing repair/cleanup
Exercising: keeping structures “usable,” adding resilience and redundancy
Personal life
Cleaning/organizing: rooms naturally drift toward disorder
Planning/note-taking/processes: fighting information loss and decision noise
Learning: building reusable mental structures that reduce future costs
Relationships/emotions: without communication and repair, misunderstandings accumulate
Society and engineering
Laws, standards, documentation: limiting organizational drift
Testing, monitoring, operations: without maintenance, software becomes harder to change and more failure-prone (the intuition behind “software entropy”)
A lot of “civilization,” “personal growth,” and “good engineering” can be seen as:
spending energy to pull systems back from their default drift toward unmanageability.
6) The big clarification: local “anti-entropy” ≠ the universe “decreasing entropy”
The common misunderstanding is subtle:
✅ Life builds local order (local entropy can decrease)
✅ But life must release more heat and waste outward (total entropy increases)
✅ So life does not violate the Second Law
You can even take a broader view: under continuous energy flow, systems can self-organize into structure—while also dissipating energy and producing entropy efficiently. In that sense, life maintains order and participates in turning high-quality energy into low-quality heat.
7) A useful analogy: treat your life as a system
Think of “you” as a system:
Don’t learn → skills decay and knowledge expires
Don’t exercise → physical capacity declines
Don’t tidy → your space drifts into mess
Don’t communicate → relationships stiffen
Don’t review → work becomes luck-driven
This isn’t a moral judgment. It’s a systems rule:
Without ongoing input (energy/resources/attention/maintenance), systems naturally drift toward states that are harder to manage and harder to restore.
That’s the everyday, practical meaning behind “fighting entropy”—and it’s also why Schrödinger’s metaphor still lands so strongly.
References (Suggested Reading)
Erwin Schrödinger — What Is Life? (1944)
Cambridge Core (book page): What Is Life?
(Optional newer edition/info page) MIT Press: What Is Life?
Ludwig Boltzmann — foundational work on statistical mechanics (entropy & microstates)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (context + history): Boltzmann’s Work in Statistical Physics
A classic Boltzmann text (accessible scan): Lectures on Gas Theory (PDF, Internet Archive)
Ilya Prigogine — dissipative structures & self-organization (non-equilibrium thermodynamics)
Nobel Prize lecture (HTML): Time, Structure and Fluctuations
Nobel lecture (PDF): prigogine-lecture.pdf
Standard thermodynamics/stat mech textbooks (Second Law, open vs isolated systems, entropy production)
Daniel V. Schroeder (OUP): An Introduction to Thermal Physics
Schroeder’s companion site/resources: physics.weber.edu/thermal
Herbert B. Callen (Wiley): Thermodynamics and an Introduction to Thermostatistics
R. K. Pathria & P. D. Beale (Elsevier): Statistical Mechanics (3rd ed.)
Frederick Reif (Waveland Press): Fundamentals of Statistical and Thermal Physics
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — statistical mechanics (conceptual clarifications)
SEP entry: Philosophy of Statistical Mechanics