From Eternity to Book Club: Chapter Nine

Welcome to this week’s installment of the From Eternity to Here book club. Now for something of a palate-cleanser, in the form of Chapter Nine, “Information and Life.”
Excerpt:
Schrödinger’s idea captures something important about what distinguishes life from non-life. In the back of his mind, he was certainly thinking of Clausius’s version of the Second Law: objects in thermal contact evolve toward a common temperature (thermal equilibrium). If we put an ice cube in a glass of warm water, the ice cube melts fairly quickly. Even if the two objects are made of very different substances—say, if we put a plastic “ice cube” in a glass of water—they will still come to the same temperature. More generally, nonliving physical objects tend to wind down and come to rest. A rock may roll down a hill during an avalanche, but before too long it will reach the bottom, dissipate energy through the creation of noise and heat, and come to a complete halt before very long.
Schrödinger’s point is simply that, for living organisms, this process of coming to rest can take much longer, or even be put off indefinitely. Imagine that, instead of an ice cube, we put a ...