Mae-Wan Ho

“An organism arises when the loop of circulating energy somehow closes on itself to give a regenerating, reproducing life cycle within which energy is mobilised, remaining stored as it is mobilised. The energy goes into complex cascades of coupled cyclic processes within the system before it is allowed to dissipate to the outside. These cascades of cycles span the entire gamut of space-times from slow to fast, from local to global, that all together, make up the life cycle.”
― Mae-Wan Ho, The Rainbow and the Worm: The Physics of Organisms

“negative entropy’ in the sense of organisation, or simply ‘entropy with the sign reversed’ has not so much to do with free energy (as Schrödinger also indicates), but with the way energy is trapped, stored and mobilised in the living system. Energy is trapped directly at the electronic level. It is stored not only as vibrational and electronic bond energies, but also in the structure of the system: in gradients, fields and flow patterns, compartments, organelles, cells and tissues. All this in turn enables organisms to mobilise their energies coherently and hence make available the entire spectrum of stored energies for work, most efficiently and rapidly, whenever and wherever energy is required.”
― Mae-Wan Ho, The Rainbow and the Worm: The Physics of Organisms