The Universal Law of Life Systems: Entropy Resistance and the Nature of Living Systems

Read the full article See related articles

Listed in

This article is not in any list yet, why not save it to one of your lists.
Log in to save this article

Abstract

The lack of a universal, physically grounded definition of life remains a criticalgap across biology, astrobiology, and artificial intelligence. Traditional definitionsoften rely on biochemical functions or evolutionary heuristics, offering limitedapplicability across substrates, scales, and domains.This paper introduces a general law: a system is alive if and only if it sustainsa positive rate of entropy resistance. In the quantum regime, this is formalized asRq (t) =−d/dt Tr[ρ(t) ln ρ(t)] >0,where ρ(t) is the system’s density matrix and the trace yields the von Neu-mann entropy. The proposed condition is substrate-independent, operationallymeasurable, and falsifiable.This formulation provides a unifying thermodynamic criterion for terrestrialbiology, synthetic organisms, coherent quantum states, and potential extraterres-trial systems—without invoking replication, metabolism, or evolution. It reframeslife not as a biological artifact, but as a distinct physical regime that persistentlyresists informational and entropic collapse.Life, under this framework, is not explained by physics. It is a phase of physics,defined by its sustained resistance to the default trajectory of the universe.

Article activity feed