What Is Life? - Molecular Theory of the Living Cell - page 561

(also called Mattergy) or Information/Life (also called Liformation ) (see Table 2.6 ),
and (3) Thirdness The Universe possesses the cosmolanguage (or Gnergy),

which is manifested as material language (including cell language) and mental
language (including natural language) as the Universe evolved (see Sect. 6.2.6 ) .
One of the surprising results of the gnergy-based theory of life (see Table 2.5 ) is that
life and information are inseparably related just as energy and matter are so related
in special relativity theory (through E

¼

mc 2 ), leading to the following inference:
Just as matter is considered as a highly condensed form of energy, so life can be viewed as a
highly condensed form of information.

¼

(16.4)

Or, more briefly,

Just as matter is a highly condensed form of energy, so life is a highly condensed form of
information. (16.5)
We may refer to Statements 16.4 and 16.5 as the information-life identity (ILI)
hypothesis in analogy to E mc 2 which can be viewed as the energy-matter

¼

identity (EMI) principle.

16.2 Life According to Schr˝dinger

The first physical theory of life appears to have been formulated in 1945 by
Schr odinger (1998) when he published his epoch-making topic, What Is Life?

This book had a major influence in inducing many talented physicists to enter the
field of biology after the World War II, ushering in the era of molecular biology
(Prigogine 1991), but the topic is not without some theoretical inaccuracies as
pointed out by Perutz (1987). For example, one of the conclusions that Schrodinger
arrived at in his topic is that
Organisms feed on negative entropy. (16.6)
I believe that the term “negative entropy” in Statement 16.6 should be replaced
with “negative entropy change,” since the Third Law of thermodynamics prohibits
“negative entropy” (see the Schr

€

odinger's Paradox in Sect. 2.1.5 ). Statement 16.6
must also be judged inaccurate because organisms, being open systems, feed on free
energy changes rather than on entropy changes alone . Free energy (e.g., Gibbs free
energy, G) is a function of both energy (E) and entropy (S) (see Eq. 2.1 ). Hence, we
can replace Statement 16.6 with Statement 16.7 which is more accurate:

€

Organisms feed on free energy. (16.7)

16.3 Life According to Bohr

Bohr attempted to characterize the difference between physics and biology based
on the analogy that he drew between classical physics (e.g., Newtonian
mechanics) and quantum mechanics . Although he introduced the two principles,