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Entropy
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Alive or Not Alive: Entropy and Living Things
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Alive or Not Alive: Entropy and Living Things

A special issue of Entropy (ISSN 1099-4300). This special issue belongs to the section "Entropy and Biology".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 July 2026 | Viewed by 2224

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Krzysztof Wojciech Fornalski

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Faculty of Physics, Warsaw University of Technology, ul. Koszykowa 75, 00-662 Warszawa, Poland
Interests: radiation biophysics; complex systems; physics of life; cancer physics; non-equilibrium statistical physics; adaptive response

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Every living thing is a highly specific and complex system, far from thermodynamic equilibrium, characterized by strong self-adaptation and entropy dissipation. Understanding these properties is crucial for distinguishing living organisms from non-living systems, such as tornadoes or snowflakes. While biology and medicine have long been at the forefront of exploring the mysteries of life, physics also offers valuable tools and perspectives that can contribute to unraveling these fundamental questions.

For many years, physicists have been developing the field of stochastic thermodynamics, which provides a deeper understanding of the physical principles governing life. This rapidly evolving discipline sheds new light on how organisms generate and regulate their entropy, how self-adaptation functions, why certain external stressors can have beneficial effects, and even how life might have emerged in the first place. By applying concepts from nonequilibrium physics, researchers are gradually piecing together a coherent framework that connects fundamental physical laws with biological processes.

Although the mathematical formalism used in these studies can be conceptually challenging, it remains relatively simple and practical for real-world applications. This accessibility allows for broader interdisciplinary research, bridging physics, biology, and related sciences in a shared effort to decipher the nature of life.

This Special Issue represents a significant step forward in these investigations. By exploring entropy-driven mechanisms, nonequilibrium dynamics, and the role of external perturbations, we move closer to a physics-based definition of what it means to be alive. We hope that future advances in nonequilibrium physics and entropy analysis will bring us even closer to understanding the physical foundations of life and its origins.

Dr. Krzysztof Wojciech Fornalski
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Entropy is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • nonequilibrium statistical physics
  • stochastic thermodynamics
  • entropy dissipation
  • dissipative adaptation
  • self-adaptation
  • adaptive response
  • physics of life
  • nonlinear dynamics
  • complex systems
  • far-from-equilibrium

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Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

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16 pages, 5549 KB  
Article
A Non-Stationary Model for Analysis of Impedance Spectra of Biological Samples
by Gabriela Janik, Urszula Kamińska, Marta Kasprzyk, Leszek Niedzicki and Teodor Buchner
Entropy 2026, 28(3), 291; https://doi.org/10.3390/e28030291 - 4 Mar 2026
Viewed by 515
Abstract
Electric impedance spectrum (EIS) is attracting attention in many areas of science, ranging from electrochemistry and material science to medical diagnosis. Interestingly, theoretical description often stops at material constants and specific physical mechanisms are represented by equivalent circuit elements, which is also motivated [...] Read more.
Electric impedance spectrum (EIS) is attracting attention in many areas of science, ranging from electrochemistry and material science to medical diagnosis. Interestingly, theoretical description often stops at material constants and specific physical mechanisms are represented by equivalent circuit elements, which is also motivated by the common use of various bridge methods. This specifically applies to biological samples, which exhibit a rich variety of responses to the electric field. Here, we present a step further from the description that utilizes equivalent circuit elements. We demonstrate how alteration of the mesoscopic structure affects the EIS in a biological sample: a cucumber under thermal treatment that comprises a cooling and warming phase. As the freezing temperature of water is exceeded during the cycle, the cucumber becomes frosted, which leads to unrecoverable changes in the internal structure, with no change of chemical composition. The experimental evidence is complemented by theoretical analysis, based on a novel approach to modeling non-stationary problems, derived from the stationary Poisson–Boltzmann equation. We demonstrate a qualitative agreement between the theoretical and the experimental results, and discuss the procedure for tuning the model. We also demonstrate that, of the temperature variations of the position of the beta dispersion, the one related to the mesoscopic structure, can be used to assess the ionic strength of the material, determine the microscopic diffusion constant, or reflect the changes in mesoscopic structure, depending on experimental protocol. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Alive or Not Alive: Entropy and Living Things)
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16 pages, 1446 KB  
Article
Entropy Bathtub for Living Systems: A Markovian Perspective
by Krzysztof W. Fornalski
Entropy 2026, 28(2), 139; https://doi.org/10.3390/e28020139 - 25 Jan 2026
Viewed by 510
Abstract
A living organism can be regarded as a dissipative, self-organizing physical system operating far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Such systems can be effectively described within the framework of Markov jump processes subjected to an external driving force that sustains the system away from equilibrium—leading, [...] Read more.
A living organism can be regarded as a dissipative, self-organizing physical system operating far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Such systems can be effectively described within the framework of Markov jump processes subjected to an external driving force that sustains the system away from equilibrium—leading, in the special case of stabilization, to a non-equilibrium steady state (NESS). By combining the Markov formalism with concepts from stochastic thermodynamics, we demonstrate the temporal evolution of entropy in such systems: entropy decreases during growth and development, stabilizes at maturity under NESS conditions, and subsequently increases during aging, death, and decomposition. This characteristic trajectory, which we term the entropy bathtub, highlights the universal thermodynamic structure of living systems. We further show that the system exhibits continuous yet time-dependent positive entropy production, in accordance with fundamental thermodynamic principles. Perturbations of the driving force—whether reversible or irreversible—naturally capture the impact of external stressors, providing a conceptual analogy to pathological processes in biological organisms. Although the model does not introduce fundamentally new elements to the physics of life, it offers a simple tool for exploring entropy-driven mechanisms in living matter. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Alive or Not Alive: Entropy and Living Things)
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Review

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23 pages, 1084 KB  
Review
Molecular Dissipative Structuring: The Fundamental Creative Force in Biology
by Karo Michaelian
Entropy 2026, 28(2), 246; https://doi.org/10.3390/e28020246 - 20 Feb 2026
Viewed by 630
Abstract
The spontaneous emergence of macroscopic dissipative structures in systems driven by generalized chemical potentials is well established in non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Examples include atmospheric/oceanic currents, hurricanes and tornadoes, Rayleigh–Bénard convection cells and reaction–diffusion patterns. Less well recognized, however, are microscopic dissipative structures that form [...] Read more.
The spontaneous emergence of macroscopic dissipative structures in systems driven by generalized chemical potentials is well established in non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Examples include atmospheric/oceanic currents, hurricanes and tornadoes, Rayleigh–Bénard convection cells and reaction–diffusion patterns. Less well recognized, however, are microscopic dissipative structures that form when the driving potential excites internal molecular degrees of freedom (electronic states and nuclear coordinates), typically via high-energy photons or coupling with ATP. Examples include dynamic nanoscale lipid rafts, kinesin or dynein motors along microtubules, and spatiotemporal Ca2+ signaling waves propagating through the cytoplasm. The thermodynamic dissipation theory of the origin of life asserts that the core biomolecules of all three domains of life originated as self-organized molecular dissipative structures—chromophores or pigments—that proliferated on the Archean ocean surface to absorb and dissipate the intense “soft” UV-C (205–280 nm) and UV-B (280–315 nm) solar flux into heat. Thermodynamic coupling to ancillary antenna and surface-anchoring molecules subsequently increased photon dissipation and enabled more complex dissipative processes, including photosynthesis, to dissipate lower-energy but higher-intensity UV-A and visible light. Further thermodynamic coupling to abiotic geophysical cycles (e.g., the water cycle, winds, and ocean currents) ultimately led to today’s biosphere, efficiently dissipating the incident solar spectrum well into the infrared. This paper reviews historical considerations of UV light in life’s origin and our proposal of UV-C molecular dissipative structuring of three classes of fundamental biomolecules: nucleobases, fatty acids, and pigments. Increases in structural complexity and assembly into larger complexes are shown to be driven by the thermodynamic imperative of enhancing solar photon dissipation. We conclude that thermodynamic selection of dissipative structures, rather than Darwinian natural selection, is the fundamental creative force in biology at all levels of hierarchy. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Alive or Not Alive: Entropy and Living Things)
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