10.5 Information and the Second Law

We might be able to get an insight into this issue from a simple experience.
Our apartment becomes disorganized over time.
Books that were placed in alphabetical order on a shelf in the living room are now strewn on the table and some are under the bed.
The dishes that were clean and neatly stacked in the cupboard are now dirty with half eaten food and are on the living room table.
The apartment is back in order after we clean it up.
The books and dishes are neatly stacked in the kitchen.

Energy was required to do the work of gathering and stacking the books, cleaning and ordering the dishes.
Information was needed to direct the work in the right direction.
We had to know how to stack the dishes and where to put the books.
The concept of information is important here.

Claude Shannon developed a formula for estimating the amount of information in a system.

Shannon's formula for information content is the same as the formula for the measure of disorder, except with a negative sign.
The mathematical insight shows that if energy and information are available, the entropy in a given locality can be decreased.
In our example of the messy living room, order can be created by work that is directed by appropriate information.
The work required to perform the ordering causes more disorder in the surroundings than the order that was created in the system itself.
Information and energy allow living systems to replicate, grow, and maintain their structures.

Plants with information in their genetic material on how to utilize the energy from the sun to make highly ordered complex structures from the simple molecule available to them are the beginning of the chain of life.

The process is the same in both humans and animals.
The intricate structure of DNA is all that is needed for the function of the organisms.
A billion units of the human genome are in a sequence.