Background
Having finished the first series that I plan to publish on quantum economics (others are planned), it became clear that explaining the use of this thinking was important before moving on to further ideas. The result was a new series, called The Quantum Essays. Previous posts are listed at the end of the post.
Like other essays in this series, this one developed out of a conversation between my wife, Jacqueline, and me, who has read more of Schrödinger's work than I have. I take responsibility for the final drafting.
I hinted last weekend that we had developed three ideas for blog posts during a Saturday morning coffee break while birdwatching. Two have been published. This one required more thought and another Saturday morning coffee break, a week later, to discuss further reading and complete it.
A list of essays in this series, which explore ideas flowing from my first series on quantum economics, is to be found at the end of this essay.
Schrödinger, entropy, equilibrium, and the lessons for society
“How does the living organism avoid decay? The obvious answer is: by eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating. The technical answer is: by continually importing negative entropy.”
Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? (1944)
That deceptively simple line from Schrödinger's wartime book, based on a lecture series, changed how we think about life. It was not just a biological remark. It was a profound statement about physics, order, disorder, and what it takes to resist the natural tendency of things to fall apart. What Schrödinger noticed, and others later formalised, has significance far beyond biology. It has implications for how we understand economies, societies, and the political choices we face now.
The problem Schrödinger confronted
The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy - the measure of disorder - never decreases in a closed system. Left alone, systems move to equilibrium, which is, as was explored earlier in this series, the maximum possible entropy state, where no further change is possible. For living organisms, this is, quite literally and ultimately, a death sentence.
However, if entropy always rises, the second law of thermodynamics implies life ought to dissolve into disorder. But it doesn't. Living systems maintain extraordinary order despite what the law implies. Cells replicate. DNA faithfully transmits information. Human beings repair and renew themselves every day.
Schrödinger's genius was to see the paradox: life is not exempt from the second law, but nor is it describable by the physics of equilibrium. He asked how do organisms keep themselves ordered in a universe tending toward disorder?
Schrödinger's answer: negative entropy
Schrödinger coined the phrase negative entropy, or “negentropy”, in answer to this question. By this, he meant that life maintains its order by importing order from outside. We eat food, which is itself the stored order of sunlight captured by plants. Plants, in turn, draw order from solar radiation.
In other words:
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Death is a state of equilibrium, the point of maximum entropy.
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Life is, however, a steady state, held far from equilibrium.
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This steady state is maintained by consuming flows of low-entropy energy and matter.
The consequence is that living systems are open systems. Life cannot be understood in isolation. It must be understood in relation to its environments, and to the energy flows that pass through them.
Order from order
Schrodinger's suggestion was not, however, the final word on this issue. He acknowledged he did not present a complete theory on these issues. To achieve that, I gather that the physics concept of Boltzmann's statistical interpretation had to be challenged.
As I understand it (and I may be wrong), that interpretation sees order as something that arises out of disorder, with improbable local fluctuations producing ordered patterns, but only temporarily. Schrödinger's argument was that this is not how life is. He argued that life transmits order from order. Hereditary material, he suggested, must be a structure stable enough to carry information, but irregular enough to encode variety. Doing so, he did, apparently, anticipate the structure of DNA.
The consequence is that in Schrödinger's framing, life is not a paradoxical exception to physics but a manifestation of it: a system that avoids equilibrium by drawing order from its surroundings, even if it exports entropy as a consequence of achieving this goal of sustaining life within that wider disorder.
Prigogine and dissipative structures
That then led me to read about the work of Ilya Prigogine, whose ideas seem to build on Schrödinger's in crucial ways.
Prigogine, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977, developed what became known as non-equilibrium thermodynamics. As I read it (and again, I stress, I may be wrong), his central claim was that systems which exist far from equilibrium — where there is constant energy flow in and out — can sometimes organise themselves into what he called dissipative structures.
These are patterns of order that arise not in spite of disorder, but because of it. Examples include rhythmic chemical oscillations and the coherence of a laser beam. In each case, energy flows through the system, and instead of breaking it down, the flow generates a kind of dynamic stability.
His key ideas, as I understand them, are these:
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Energy flows can create order rather than destroy it. Far from equilibrium, systems can spontaneously organise themselves into stable or recurring patterns.
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The second law of thermodynamics still holds: overall entropy increases. But local order is maintained because the system exports its disorder elsewhere.
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Life itself can be seen as such a structure — one that maintains internal order by dissipating energy into its environment, much as Schrödinger suggested through his idea of “negative entropy.”
In this light, Schrödinger's notion of importing order becomes, in Prigogine's language, a process of exporting entropy. Living systems, including societies and economies, stay organised only so long as energy, resources, and information continue to flow through them.
I would not pretend to be any sort of master of the physics of this. But the conceptual bridge this seems to offer, between the physical, the biological, and the social, feels immensely important. It suggests that order is not accidental, nor is it ever static; it is sustained only through continual movement, exchange, and transformation, all of which are characteristics of life.
The significance of Schrödinger and Prigogine
What, then, is the significance of Schrödinger's insight, as deepened by Prigogine?
First, it shows that equilibrium is not the state of life. Equilibrium is death.
Second, it shows that order is not an anomaly. It is a natural consequence of energy flows through open systems.
Third, it makes clear that sustainability requires constant renewal. A steady state is not stasis. It is a dynamic balance, maintained only by constant throughput.
And fourth, it highlights fragility. Remove the flows of negentropy, for example, by cutting off energy or destroying ecological cycles, and life collapses into equilibrium.
Lessons for economics and society
Why does this matter beyond physics and biology? Because economies and societies are also nonequilibrium systems. They, too, maintain complex organisation by exchanging flows of energy, resources, and information with their environment.
Yet mainstream neoclassical and neoliberal economics use equilibrium as their central metaphor: supply equals demand, markets clear, growth balances savings and investment, and so on. The models are built around stability at rest.
Schrödinger and Prigogine, however, teach us something different:
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Equilibrium is collapse, not stability.
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Order requires constant input of energy and information.
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Systems thrive only far from equilibrium, in dynamic states.
This is precisely what we see in real economies: constant change, renewal, and disruption. But unlike natural systems, economies are governed by human choice. We can structure them to sustain order or to collapse into disorder.
Policy implications
Several lessons flow from this (and the agony of trying to understand the ideas that lead to these conclusions).
First, resilience requires energy flows. Austerity is a policy of shutting down energy flows by reducing public investment, suppressing wages, and cutting welfare. It drives economies toward equilibrium, which in social terms means stagnation and collapse.
Second, sustainability requires entropy management. We cannot pretend that infinite growth is possible on a finite planet. Entropy is exported outward, into ecosystems. If the environment cannot absorb it, collapse follows. Schrödinger's insight warns us that living systems cannot survive if the wider environment is destroyed. We have to manage climate change.
Third, information is central. Just as DNA transmits order, societies depend on accurate information flows: free media, honest statistics, transparent government. Corruption, propaganda, and secrecy all degrade the information entropy balance, pushing society toward disorder.
Fourth, justice is essential. Inequality is a form of internal disorder. It corrodes the steady state by concentrating flows of energy and resources in one part of the system while starving others. A healthy society, like a healthy organism, requires balance across its parts.
From physics to a politics of care
Schrödinger did not claim to have explained life in full, but he reframed the problem. Life is not a miracle outside physics. It is physics, but physics far from equilibrium.
The same reframing is needed in economics and politics. We cannot model society as if it tends naturally to equilibrium. We must understand it as a system of energy, information, and care, constantly in need of replenishment.
That replenishment cannot be left to chance. It must be actively organised, through public services, welfare states, environmental stewardship, and democratic participation. These are the social equivalents of “feeding on negative entropy.” They are how we maintain order, coherence, and the possibility of renewal.
Neglect them, and collapse follows.
Conclusion
Schrödinger's insight into entropy and equilibrium was not a footnote in physics. It was a window into the conditions of life itself. Prigogine's work showed that order is a lawful consequence of energy flows, not an exception. Together, they gave us the intellectual tools to see life - and by extension, society - as systems that survive only by sustaining themselves far from equilibrium.
The lesson is stark. To cut off the flows that sustain us, of energy, of information, of justice, of care, is to invite collapse into entropy. To maintain them is to preserve the fragile but precious order of life.
Economics and politics must recognise this. Schrödinger's question, “What is life?” is also our question: What is the life of society, and how do we sustain it?
The answer is clear: by importing order, by renewing flows, by resisting the false comfort of equilibrium. Life is not rest; it is the continuous, dynamic struggle against entropy. The challenge of our age is to organise that struggle in the interests of all.
Other essays in this series:
- The Quantum Economics series (this link opens a tab with them all in it)
- The Quantum Essays: Observing and Engaging
- The Quantum Essays: Quantum MMT: The wave function of sovereign spending
- The Quantum Essays: Is equilibrium only possible in death?
- The Quantum essays: Economics, the Big Bang and Rachel Reeves
- The Quantum Essays: Quantum economics, discounting, and the cost of inaction
Comments
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Thanks to you both for a most interesting read-more-than-once piece.
Might there be at least two types of equilibrium?
1) Static equilibrium (but does not decay follow death?)
2) Mobile equilibrium, as in riding a bicycle?
What/where might be a definition of Neoliberal equilibrium?
How might the application of a theory of equilibrium be justified in practice in a country where its practical consequences do not seem to have an equilibrium between increasing numbers of multi-millionaires and the use of food banks?
Mobile equilibrium is unstable equilibrium – or not equilibrium at all, in other words.
The phrase you are looking for is meta stability 🙂
The system is in its local energy minimum, but there exist further lower energy (and therefore more stable) states. Some energy is required to escape from the meta stable state, but once out of that state, it is easy to fall into a deeper lower energy/more stable state. Imagine descending down the humps of a roller coaster
Another nudge to add to your thinking, Richard, is to have a read about Gibbs free energy. It describes why we get local order, rather than disorder everywhere. For some systems it’s more energetically favourable to arrange in an ordered manner locally than to become random. Think of oil pearls in a vinaigrette dressing – it’s energetically cheaper for the oil to clump into balls than to share lots of surface with the aqueous vinegar.
Finally, I will mention hysteresis. I vaguely remember you discussing hysteresis recently-ish, but I think it ties in here. Basically the input of energy (or money) into a system does not guarantee a defined state will be achieved.
From an economic/public services perspective, you gain a period of grace once a system is up and running, wherein you can withdraw expenditure, and the system will tick along alright. But at some point the service will begin to degrade. At this point, you can’t just put a little bit more money back in to try to push the service back up to the desired quality, much more money must be used to overcome the hysteresis of the service (lost infrastructure/staff/knowledge/good will), to return to the desired service quality.
Thanks again for another thought provoking piece. I really enjoy these discussions around the physics metaphor descriptions of the economy 🙂
Many thanks for this. Noted, and now you have sent us off down a new rabbit hole, but I appreciate that.
What you write I believe to be correct. However, it can be extended by adding in the role of consciousness. So for example you quote Schrödinger as saying:-
“How does the living organism avoid decay? The obvious answer is: by eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating. The technical answer is: by continually importing negative entropy.”
When strictly speaking I think he needed to say:-
“How does the living organism avoid decay? The obvious answer is: by eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating. The technical answer is: by continually choosing to import negative entropy.”
Further down in your post you write:-
“Schrödinger and Prigogine, however, teach us something different … unlike natural systems, economies are governed by human choice.”
In reality both natural systems and human economies are driven by choice available to us because of the existence of consciousness in the universe. It is worthwhile for each of us to consider why this should be.
https://www.davidabel.us/papers/The-common-denominator-of-all-known-lifeforms.pdf
One very interesting factor stemming from the existence of consciousness in the universe is that it allows life forms including our own to cooperate and this choosing to do so exists right down at the microscopic scale of bacteria:-
https://ankara.lti.cs.cmu.edu/11780/sites/default/files/BacterialLinguisticsandSocialIntelligence.pdf
The big question therefore is does consciousness exist to allow life forms to cooperate. Does it also exist to facilitate the development through cooperation of ever more complex life forms and to what point?
Good additions. I admit this one was hard.
And I like your last question: I will have a coffee and discuss that.
You cannot imagine how much brain effort has gone into trying to answer that question over the last couple of hours. Wait for an answer in the next Quantum Essay – it is being refined this afternoon.
Now come on. Let us not get carried away. I would like you to validate the statement ‘consciousness in the universe’?
The universe I see before me seems to run on automatic. Materials and forces seem to work together but also clash and in doing so destroy and create. There is a form of order, gravity is in there somewhere. Our knowledge of this order grows daily but before it we are powerless.
At this juncture the only route now is to bring human philosophy in – surely? There is of course another route and that is the religious one. But that is not me.
As far as I am aware, human beings are conscious. A rock is not, and if it is I have no way of knowing what that must be like. So I must set the rock aside and think about my mode of consciousness which I share with those like me.
In terms of human consciousness, I take the Hobbesian view that at the root of our existence is not the pursuit of knowledge or worldly goods but the pursuit of survival.
So, what does survival look like? In human terms it comes in many forms and the means of which are subjective unfortunately, but the aim is the same even if in practice it works against one’s survival and others. This subjectivity of how and what can apply to persons and people’s (groups).
That is your answer really. The problem is people. John Gray (2023) says accurately that ‘Humans do not desire the good; the good is what they desire’. The emphasis is the desire bit which is where the lack of agreement lies.
Contrast that with the workings of a beehive or an ant’s nest or how fungi work, where there appears to be a sublimation to the collective. Where is your Neo-liberalism there ?
It is man that it entropic. It is man who talks of ‘will’ and in doing so disturbs inter-dependent systems. It is man who will not acknowledge nature. It is man who plays at being God. It is being Neo-liberal and making your own reality ignoring the impact on others. It is man’s abuse of language. It is a love of destruction in order to get your own way. It is faulty consciousness.
I have another piece on this coming…addressing many of these issues
I don’t believe Hobbes was right.
First: Mutual understanding and co-operation is what enabled us to become human. https://www.newsfromnowhere.co.uk/page/detail/Mothers-and-others/?K=BDZ0011478974
Second: my favourite quote: “The ultimate hidden secret of the world is that is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.” ~ David Graeber.
Third: my second favourite quote, attributed to George Box: “”All models are wrong, but some are useful”. When the model is no longer useful, we can change it.
That’s what blogs like this are for.
Hobbes and his followers would make it one way, Christ would have made it another way, the Buddha another.
Does consciousness exist beyond the brain?
Our current scientific paradigm insists consciousness is created by the brain. Our spiritual traditions say otherwise. It exists outside and pre-exists it. The only way to access this directly seems to be by deep meditation-the samadhi state of Buddhism and Hinduism. Apart from mystic experiences.
We have had 140 years ( from the establishment of the Society for Psychic Research at Cambridge in1882) of investigation into after death communications and similar phenomena. And about 50 years of investigation into Near Death Experiences. There is a large body of evidence to examine.
The counter argument has been there is no way to explain such things as telepathy, healing by touch, clairvoyance, survival of death and so on. Therefore they must be misinformation by the brain, coincidence or misinterpretation. A universal consciousness underlying the physical world could be a way to do so. Eastern religions find it easier to discuss these things as in essence they are religions of exploration. Many of the Christian churches avoid these issues.
In the 1930s the Bishop of my Diocese ( Bath and Wells ) chaired an Anglican committee into Spiritualism, which flourished after the First world war. The majority report said there was scope to work more closely with Spiritualists. The Archbishop of Canterbury refused to publish it though it was leaked in 1948.
Since then we have had the ‘New Age’ and all sorts of ideas have proliferated.
To my mind there are two institutions which examine these issues scientifically and well, the Scientific and Medical Network and the American Institute of Neotic Studies.
If I could give advice to the new Archbishop ( who has a scientific training) it would be to look closely at areas. I feel the church is like a man in desert trying to wring the last few drops out of a wet towel ( or old wineskins as in the NT) i.e. the Bible we have inherited while at his feet is a stream of running water.
But it would challenge doctrines inherited. Teilhard de Chardin wrote of a developing universe and was forbidden by the Vatican to teach. But challenging the old enables progress.
Descartes rules in the CoE.
Of course conciousness exist beyond the brain. It is literally enlightenment thinking that prevents this happening.
In physics an atom in a crystal or a molecule is affected by its immediate neighbours, who may even be other items of the same atomic mass. They will have close electrical and sometimes magnetic interactions. If the atom is at the surface it will also interact with air or whatever else is there through friction, even pressure changes, and also the earlier two forces. But its connection to atoms a few millimetres away will be real but scarcely measurable, likewise the surface atom will be affected by the wind coming over the hill but the quantum of that effect will be absolutely tiny, a rounding error. Like the gravitational effect of Pluto on the Sun.
We have an analogy to what Smith said about human behaviours:
“To man is allotted a much humbler department, but one much more suitable to the weakness of his powers, and to the narrowness of his comprehension: the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, . .” and
“Regard for remote relations becomes, in every country, less and less, according as this state of civilization has been longer and more completely established.”
In this context I find it difficult to establish a wish to centralise decision making and budgetary control.
I am minded of a recent comment on this blog:
“go through all the powers and tax responsibilities devolved to cantons in Switzerland and to the States in the USA and say to the Local Authorities that these are yours now, knock yourselves out.” That commentator should have gone further and advocated for powers all the way down to the parish, church or even the individual, the quantum, wherever practicable.
In connection with quantum biology we have analogies such as the central nervous system and someone so minded to centralise decision making to Brussels or the UN in New York might run with that comparison. On the other hand I can think of good analogies from biology that would favour decentralisation, but there at least exists an analogy for centralisation. I cannot though find one in quantum physics for the centralised powers you desire to deploy.
I disagree. Without a currency there is no state. And only a state can control a currency. That precludes deregulation to the extent you wish for it.
Sometimes to get from Derby to Nottingham, you have to go via Carlisle.
My point being that such is the wall of conventional Neo-lib bullshit that we need to delve deeper into the reality of life in order to demonstrate just how vacuous Hayek, Friedman and Thatcher actually are. That is what you seem to be doing Richard.
I get it. There is no ‘unseen hand’ here, it is just the behaviour of life.
The same rules of nature apply to anything man made. Why should they not? Man builds infrastructure, he should then look after it instead of allowing it to become full of potholes or close to collapse. And what about people? The same applies.
As I have said before, Neo-liberalism is an unnatural way of looking at the world and pretending that it is not inter- dependent when it is. But then given how it has and still does prosper from the financial intervention of the rich who are partial to their status, it is not hard to see the just how hollow Neo-liberalism really is and just how antithetical it is – contrariness is all it is in the face of nature. This contrariness, this sticking two fingers up to nature, leads to entropy for sure.
But what emerges from this is of course the end of the line question – where is this taking us? The short answer is toward death. Democracies that do not work because of anti-natural ideas leading the way will lead us into authoritarian death cults like fascism which will push us further away from the inter-dependence of nature and towards the darkness.
‘We are all in it together’ said David Cameron. In the midst of the lies he was telling about his own party’s intentions, how right he was about something more fundamental. The word ‘tragedy’ comes to mind.
Thanks
There is more to come…
Wee have drunk too much coffee amongst the birdwatching this morning.
“The big question therefore is does consciousness exist to allow life forms to cooperate. Does it also exist to facilitate the development through cooperation of ever more complex life forms and to what point?”
This is the shite they teach at Uni and why most graduates are no skills in the workplace. And they wonder why they can’t get jobs.
Go on then, try to answer it and show us how clever you are. If you can’t, how can you reason the answer to the questions we face? Please explain.
And oddly, one of my English teachers in the 70s was a Peter Hewitt – an amazingly clever man and a revolutionary socialist (which I am not and never have been). You are obviously utterly unlike him.
Peter
We need people who can think originally in order to solve our problems which are immense.
We don’t need more people who just go along to get along and pretend everything is rosey which is what power wants. So as the father of two students I think the universities are serving mankind well.
It is the markets that are failing graduates and the human race by not wanting to change, in fact they are going backwards. As a typical fascist old chap, you would have to blame some one else wouldn’t you, after all.
That was not a question by the way. It was an assertion.
🙂
This a somewhat technical point that is entirely consistent with what has been said.
Entropy is not about disorder or randomness. Entropy is the mathematical measure of
the LACK of information we have about a system. Entropy is related to the number of
ways our limited information about a system can be expressed by all possible
combinations of microscopic configurations of the system. It is on a par with energy
as a fundamental quantity in physics.
For example a gas in a bottle is a physical system in which each atom can be
specified by a quantum state with any one of a number of possible energies. If all
we know is the total energy E of the gas then the entropy S will be given by the
number W of all possible combinations of quantum states of the atoms whose energies
sum to E. This is a huge number and so entropy is defined as the logarithm of W:
S = k.logW
where k is a constant.
E.T. Jaynes
https://informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/jaynes/Jaynes_Gibbs_Boltzmann.pdf
Entropy so defined is equivalent to Shannon’s definition of information entropy for
random variables:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)
and to Clausius’ entropy for heat engines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics
It is easy to see why a living organism has a lower entropy than a dead organism.
Functioning organs and cells significantly constrain what the organism’s atoms can do.
No such constraints exist for a dead organism.
Entropy is a powerful and general idea. It has useful applications in economics and
to many other areas of science and engineering.
Thanks for this.
Jacqueline and I spent a lot of time discussing infuriation and entropy last night. I think we are in agreement with you.
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— Steven Pinker
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