How can we reconcile this cosmic drive toward life with the cosmic drive toward heat death? The answer can be found in the famous 1944 book What’s Life? by Erwin Schrödinger, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Schrödinger pointed out that a hallmark of a living system is that it maintains or reduces its entropy by increasing the entropy around it. In other words, the second law of thermodynamics has a life loophole: although the total entropy must increase, it’s allowed to decrease in some places as long as it increases even more elsewhere. So life maintains or increases its complexity
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