β Scribed by Charles H. Lineweaver; Chas A. Egan
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
We review the cosmic evolution of entropy and the gravitational origin of the free energy required by life. All dissipative structures in the universe including all forms of life, owe their existence to the fact that the universe started in a low entropy state and has not yet reached equilibrium. The low initial entropy was due to the low gravitational entropy of the nearly homogeneously distributed matter and has, through gravitational collapse, evolved gradients in density, temperature, pressure and chemistry. These gradients, when steep enough, give rise to far from equilibrium dissipative structures (e.g., galaxies, stars, black holes, hurricanes and life) which emerge spontaneously to hasten the destruction of the gradients which spawned them. This represents a paradigm shift from "we eat food" to "food has produced us to eat it".
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
In a recent series of articles, Gilat has proposed that the interaction between a chiral molecule and a solvent can lead to an ordering mechanism. This proposal conflicts with the second law of thermodynamics.