Sorkin and colleagues have derived an equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics for living systems, which establishes a relation between such a cell’s active uptake of energy and its random-looking path in terms of entropy production.
Physicists and computer scientists are using stochastic thermodynamics to understand the energy costs of computation, with implications for designing more energy-efficient devices.
The second law of thermodynamics is among the most sacred in all of science, but it has always rested on 19th century arguments about probability. New arguments trace its true source to the flows of quantum information.
