In 1943, in a series of lectures, Erwin Schrodinger presented to the world his most recent reflections on the thermodynamics of living beings I mean, what are living beings from the perspective of the flow of energy, heat and work? These lectures became a book called What Is Life? Schrodinger's work contains two main ideas, two research projects And yes, Schrodinger is known as the guy who put cats in boxes But he did more with his life than just quantum physics He was also a color vision specialist Seriously, back Schrodinger's first idea is the idea of order through
order Which basically states that life must have some specific mechanism to reproduce its organization According to Schrodinger, living beings had some kind of crystal inside them And this crystal encodes the information of what makes a living being and allows the living being to propagate information using this crystal And if you see any similarities between Schrodinger's idea and what we know today as DNA Congratulations, you're paying attention to the video Damn short video generation Schrodinger basically predicted the existence of DNA He may not have gotten the details right, but the general concept did And I don't
even need to tell you that DNA hadn't been discovered at that time Schrodinger's second idea receives less attention, but is also extremely interesting So much so that it is the topic of the video And it's Schrodinger's paradox The second law of thermodynamics shows that the natural tendency of the world is to go from order to disorder From organization to chaos, from low to high entropy But Schrodinger pointed out that living beings are structures with a high level of chemical organization And that they perpetuate themselves by maintaining their organization and creating more organization in the form
of other living beings So living beings seem at first to disregard the second law of thermodynamics And that seems wrong Nothing in physics disregards the second law of thermodynamics If you put all the ingredients of a human being in a bathtub You won't see the molecules organize themselves into a human being And the reason this doesn't happen is that it's a violation of the second law of thermodynamics But somehow that's exactly what happened on our planet So there seems to be something wrong with our understanding of the second law And Schrodinger's idea is precisely to
reconcile the second law of thermodynamics with the fact that living beings maintain organization And this project became known as order through disorder Solving the problem can help to understand how life came about, how it is maintained And what its energetic function is on the planet's surface Or in other words, how organized living beings arise and perpetuate themselves in a world where everything tends towards chaos Schrodinger himself already had a preliminary answer to this question But to understand his answer, we need to understand the basics of thermodynamics I just wanted to say beforehand that the t-shirts
I wear in the videos are available in my Alos store This one is even from the new collection All the prints have a meaning behind them and all are made with great care by us And you get 10% off your first purchase using coupon LOS10 And it applies to both sweatshirts and T-shirts So go to usilos.com.br and choose which part of the universe you want to wear together with me And now, let's get back to the video Thermodynamics studies energy in its most fundamental form It doesn't matter what the energy looks like or what's using
it It should be possible to use thermodynamics to describe what is happening And according to thermodynamics, energy only exists in two different forms Either as heat or as work Work is all energy that can be used in a practical way to change the world around us in a useful and practical way And heat is everything else It's the energy that can't be accurately used to generate work Basically useless energy For example, your car's engine uses chemical energy inside gasoline to generate work Making the wheels turn But he wastes some of it And this generates heat
and warms up the engine as a result And this example already contains the first two laws of thermodynamics in disguise The first law of thermodynamics is the one that says that all energy is either work or heat There is no third type of energy And besides, energy is conserved You never lose or gain energy All that can happen is that one type of energy turns into another And the second law of thermodynamics is the fundamental rule of energy transformation Every process that does work irreversibly generates heat In other words, every time you use energy usefully,
part of that energy becomes useless energy And this process cannot be undone All the energy used becomes more and more useless permanently For example, before the gasoline in a car burns, chemical energy is rich in useful energy And it can be used in practical ways to change the world After being used in the engine, part of the energy remains work and moves the car But the other part becomes heat, which is an energy of low utility And there is a physical quantity that measures how useful a portion of energy is, which is entropy If energy
can still be used as work, entropy is low If little energy can be used as work and the energy is mainly heat, entropy is high And if the energy is basically just heat, that's the state of maximum entropy In which all the energy has already been used So another possible form for the second law of thermodynamics is as follows Entropy always increases Everything in nature tends towards the state of highest entropy And there's yet another way of talking about entropy Which connects it with disorder in living beings Entropy measures order, which is the organization of
physical systems For example, how many ways can your closet be well organized with all the clothes folded neatly in the right places? Few There are few ways to organize your closet You need to fold all your clothes and organize them You might have moved one or two things around, but that's it A well-organized closet is a low entropy closet Because there are few ways for it to be organized And how many ways can your closet be disorganized? There are many ways to mess up a closet Basically any configuration of clothes that aren't folded is a
mess And that's the case with high entropy There are many ways to be messy and few ways to be organized So much so that if you make any changes to your organized closet You'll probably mess it up a bit It's easier to mess up than to organize So entropy increases, disorganization increases And your room gets messier And you can use that as an excuse when they ask you to tidy up your room And this is where Schrodinger's paradox comes in Life manages to avoid the increase in entropy and maintain chemical organization And it's been doing
it on Earth for billions of years Just so you understand how strange this is It's as if you walked into your bedroom and saw that all your clothes had folded themselves Schrodinger's answer to the paradox was as follows According to the second law, the increase in entropy only applies globally In other words, the entropy of an entire isolated system has to increase But parts of the system can have a local reduction in entropy In other words, order can arise at specific points in a multi-part system As long as the total entropy of the entire system
still increases Living beings are not systems in terms of entropy They have access to energy mainly from the sun Life uses energy from the sun directly or indirectly To maintain its order and avoid the second law of thermodynamics There is no contradiction What's more, to maintain internal organization Living beings consume and use large amounts of energy Which in the process increases the entropy around them In other words, looking at the planet as a whole Living beings cause an increase in global entropy Life literally pays a price to maintain order Living beings do not violate the
second law of thermodynamics They contribute to it And I could stop here, that sounds like a good answer But Schrodinger's answer didn't stop with him It provoked several other scientists to look at living beings with new eyes Thermodynamic eyes The search for how order is formed from disorder And here they found yet another problem Thermodynamics was not ready to deal with biology Traditional thermodynamics had been built to describe equilibrium states An equilibrium state is a point at which a physical system has the same temperature, chemical potential and pressure as its environment And for life, the
only state of equilibrium is death Yeah, if you thought this video wasn't going to have an existential crisis, I've got news for you Life's trick for staying alive It uses cell membranes to create a difference in chemical potential Energy difference Temperature difference And all the differences it took to stay alive And then use these differences to generate work that is used to maintain the organization of the living being And keep it separate from the world It is precisely this separation from the environment and breaking all the balances that allows life to live on To study
the thermodynamics of life To understand the flow of energy in living beings in ecosystems We need to rewrite the laws of thermodynamics out of equilibrium And before I go into detail This is a current research project that is still going on So things could change We're going to see cutting-edge science in this video The idea that gained the most traction to build the laws of thermodynamics out of equilibrium It's the idea of gradient destruction Gradients are simply differences, variations in some quantity For example, a color gradient starts in one color and gradually varies and ends
in another color A pressure gradient starts with a pressure It gradually changes and ends at another pressure And the same goes for temperature gradients, chemical potential, energy and everything else You like gradients even if you don't know it Because without gradients of chemical potential you wouldn't exist Nature, on the other hand, hates gradients And that's the principle of thermodynamics out of equilibrium Nature tends to destroy any gradient that forms And the more intense that gradient is the more complex the ways nature will find to destroy them For example, if you have a slight pressure gradient
Between the sea and a beach, a light pleasant breeze forms And dissipates the pressure difference Now, if you have a big difference in pressure and temperature For example, as in the collision of tropical and attic air masses This forms a storm, and even a hurricane The hurricane uses absurd amounts of energy And mixes the rapidly rotating air masses And in this he destroys the pressure gradient quite dramatically Breezes and hurricanes are caused by the same differences But on different scales Small differences, small gradients generate small effects in nature And big differences can generate extreme effects
In other words, nature will always return to equilibrium And eliminate the differences in physical quantities And here it is worth noting that the state of equilibrium is always the state of greatest entropy There's simply no getting away from it And the cool part comes now The hurricane is an organized, isolated system that perpetuates itself A hurricane has very low entropy And it's an extremely efficient engine But all this organization comes out of nowhere in the chaotic atmosphere On the way to trying to reach the true state of highest entropy The atmosphere has created something extremely
organized with low entropy A hurricane is an example of order arising from disorder Exactly what Schrodinger wanted to explain about life So the hurricane does everything it can It makes perfect thermodynamic sense looking at the principle of gradient destruction Two air masses with different temperatures and pressures separated They represent an organized, low entropy configuration With a high potential for doing work This energy gradient needs to be eliminated And nature will find a way to mix the air masses And achieve balance And precisely because of the low entropy scenario There is a lot of work to
be done mixing the masses Then the atmosphere creates a storm that mixes the air masses Quite efficiently Order in a hurricane does not arise despite the disorder of the atmosphere It arises to generate disorder quickly The hurricane does not organize itself despite the second thermodynamic area But exactly because of it And perhaps the same is true for life Life is an excellent energy sink A born gradient destroyer We use the energy gradient generated by sunlight falling through our atmosphere to create these bubbles of organization Complex life And in the process, we transform the low entropy
sunlight Into high entropy thermal radiation But unlike a hurricane, the sun is much larger than the Earth And the gradient of sunlight cannot be overcome The energy gradient generated by the sun cannot be completely destroyed So there are no thermodynamic reasons for life to stop perpetuating itself In fact, all this energy on the planet makes it more likely that life will continue to perpetuate itself Finding different paths And increasingly efficient ways to transform solar energy into high entropy heat Life increasingly seeks processes to try to achieve an equilibrium that cannot truly be achieved And in
this sense, life is not something But rather the process The process that the surface of our planet has found to try to achieve balance And resist the injection of concrete energy Just as a hurricane is a vortex of air organizing itself to reduce pressure differences Living beings are vortices of chemical stability Trying to deal with the energy gradient imposed by the sun And perhaps that's what happened on our planet Life did not arise contrary to the second law of thermodynamics But precisely to make it happen And perhaps that's what happened on our planet Life did
not arise contrary to the second law of thermodynamics But to actually make it happen In a way, we exist to help the universe consume all its useful energy faster How will you use your energy today? Thank you very much and see you next time!
