Negantropy
| Collection | GlossariumBITri |
|---|---|
| Author | José María Díaz-Nafría |
| Editor | José María Díaz-Nafría |
| Year | 2016 |
| Volume | 2 |
| Number | 1 |
| ID | 9 |
| Object type | Concept |
| Domain | Biology Statistical Physics |
| es | negantropía |
| fr | néguentropie |
| de | Negentropie |
Negantropy is the negative value of the entropy. Although the concept was first used by Erwin Schrödinger in 1943, who stated that “life feeds on negative entropy” (1944), the term “negantropy” was first coined by the French physicist Léon Brillouin (1953), who generalised the second law of thermodynamics as: in any transformation of a closed system, the quantity “entropy minus information” must always increase over time or may, at best, remain constant. Moreover, Brillouin’s theory of information is considered as a consequence of the negentropy principle, which might be illustrated by the negentropy cicle: negentropy–information–decision–negentropy.
Criticizing the use of this term, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker stated: “Information has been correlated with knowledge, entropy with ignorance and consequently information has been labelled as negentropy. But this is a conceptual or verbal lack of clarity” (1985). To overcome such obscurity he distinguished between potential information (designated by Shannon’s entropy) and actual information, which is factual and present. By knowing the macro-state of an object, the potential information is bounded; while the specification of its microstate is actual information (Lyre 2002).
References
- BRILLOUIN, L. (1953). The negentropy principle of information. Journal of Applied Physics, 24, 1152-1163.
- LYRE, H. (2002). Informationstheorie. Eine philosophisch-naturwissenschftliche Einführung. Munich: W.Fink Verlag.
- SCHRÖDINGER, E. (1944). What is life? The physical aspect of the living cell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- WEIZSÄCKER, C.F. von. (1985). Aufbau der Physik. Munich: Hanser.