“For the purposes of science, information had to mean something special. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe.” Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive.
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