Talk:Negentropy

Untitled
this page is confusing. it contradicts itself all over the place.

1. it says schrodinger used the term negative entropy, and brillouin used the term negentropy later. then later it says 'by using the term "Negentropy", [schroedinger] could....'

2. it says "negentropy is a misconception...", then it goes on to explain the technical meaning of negentropy. if it's a misconception, exactly what is it explaining, or where is the misconception? (did he mean it's merely a misnomer?)

4. it's not clear what schodinger is saying in the quote.. what's described above is NOT free energy, but the quote seems to be implying that schodinger thought life is free energy.. i'm sure he was smarter than that, but then, what the heck was he saying?

(i'd also like to know if the thermodynamic description of negentropy and the information-theoretic description of negentropy are isomorphic.)

Inhahe 02:50, 26 July 2006 (UTC)


 * N=Smax-S=-Φ=-klnZ Φ - Massieu potential See Free entropy Z - Partition function
 * See also Gibbs free energy, Gibbs' 1873 available energy (free energy) graph, AC - capacity for entropy (the amount by which the entropy of the body can be increased without changing the energy of the body or increasing its volume)--79.185.179.192 (talk) 01:24, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

I think that this article should be merged into syntropy.

anonymous 20:58, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Nonsense
This page is complete nonsense. The author obviously has no idea about random variables, densities. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.44.75.191 (talk • contribs) 20:52, 7 June 2007 (UTC)

If you are looking for more information . ..
I read this article as a supplement to what I was studying in a college course, and as was pointed out in the previous posts, it is much too confusing to be of any use. The author seems to think that negative entropy only refers to living systems and not systems in general. If there are those looking for a better explanation of what entropy and negative entropy are look in Organizational Communication: Foundations, Challenges, and Misunderstandings second edition by Modaff, DeWine, and Butler. The section you want is in Chapter 4 (Systems Theory) on page 73. It is a college text book so I do not know how difficult it is to find, but it is a great resource if you are looking into something other then biological systems in the application of the term negentropy. 71.191.23.120 (talk) 21:13, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Term is incorrect
Coining an antonym by adding the prefix 'neg' to it makes no sense grammatically. First of all entropy is a scalar: It has no direction and hence is not positive. Secondly, in english the correct rendering of such a prefix would be anentropy (like aerobic/anaerobic). You might as well say something was negpossible, negimagineable or negsensical. Article should be permanently deleted along with any reference to it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 114.77.66.225 (talk) 04:42, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

Network entropy
What is "Network entropy"? I cannot find it in the work of P. Comon, as cited. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 161.53.64.104 (talk) 12:32, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

relation to Gibbs free energy
Learning about entropy, and the thermodynamic law that any entropy decrease is offset by entropy increase (such as heat energy) of the surroundings I came to understand syntropy as the local decrease in entropy minus the 'generation' of entropy, or the sum total of entropy increase in the system and surroundings. While the magnitude of this may be Helmholz free energy (related to Gibbs free energy) I may define syntropy as its derivative (i.e. how fast it changes over time). Is that definition ever used? 24.184.234.24 (talk) 04:30, 1 October 2010 (UTC)LeucineZipper

Reverted edits by Antichristos
Here I reverted a lot of rewriting and additions by user. I believe it's WP:OR and WP:SYN, most egregiously in the section on gravity but more generally as well. There were citations but they often did not support the text. Antichristos's extensive edits to another article have also been reverted, see discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics. What do other people think? --Steve (talk) 03:06, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion
I have been studying science for over 30 years, including college courses in advanced physics and physical chemistry, and I have not until today ever come across the term 'negentropy.' Although entropy can be described in terms of energy, it is not equivalent to energy, and describing negentropy as "negative entropy" really doesn't make sense since in either case entropy is entropy. By definition entropy can only "flow" in one direction; there is no such thing as a negative direction for entropy, only a space-time consideration which involve traveling back and forth in time and space. I strongly suspect that this page is bogus, but I don't have time to waste verifying whether the included references are legitimate. I found some clearly ridiculous websites using this term to justify some kind of increased energy in water by introducing vortexing and magnetic fields, which is complete horsepucky. Somebody please prove me right. Jdevola (talk) 16:42, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Negentropy is Schroedinger's misinterpretation of entropy
While Schroedinger wrote that entropy was a "physical measurable quantity", he introduced this term with a clear misconception: he writes "what an organism feeds upon is negative entropy". Entropy is not a physical entity which can be fed to an organism. Entropy is a value which unique and only feature is this: it grows on closed systems; an organism can;t feed upon a value or quantity. If something, negentropy should be the opposite of entropy: a value that reduces on closed systems. But the essential feature of entropy is that entropy ALWAYS grows on closed systems (2nd law of thermodynamics). Entropy can reduce on open systems, but that's another history. Therefore, there is no such thing as negentropy, unless a new and precise meaning is clearly stated.

The popular myth says that entropy is chaos, that entropy grows because things seems to turn into chaos. Therefore they think that negentropy is some property that life has which causes the opposite effect of entropy. Clearly, there is a big number of fallacies on this chain of reasoning. Rodolfoap (talk) 05:29, 17 June 2017 (UTC)

Add this to the article then please, if supported by RSes.

Zezen (talk) 05:46, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

subject of article
The body of article is only about the statistical meaning (I think) but most of the lead is about the biological meaning (though it is difficult to follow). Maybe we should focus the article more and point to Entropy and life (a much more readable article) for the biological meaning. Volunteer1234 (talk) 17:18, 15 September 2018 (UTC)


 * I did some edits along this line. Volunteer1234 (talk) 17:33, 15 September 2018 (UTC)