The theory is that they are one in the same, or better to say that entropy is the process that drives life. In that, life grows in complexity in order to dissipate heat (i.e., increase entropy) more efficiently.
Just look at Earth. Life is incredibly complex but is ultimately driving everything towards dust.
Depending on how you look at it, life is driven by the opposite of entropy. Schrödinger in his book, What is Life?, calls it "negative entropy" or even "free energy".
> In the 1944 book What is Life?, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who in 1933 had won the Nobel Prize in Physics, theorized that life – contrary to the general tendency dictated by the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system tends to increase – decreases or keeps constant its entropy by feeding on negative entropy.
> The problem of organization in living systems increasing despite the second law is known as the Schrödinger paradox. This, Schrödinger argues, is what differentiates life from other forms of the organization of matter.
> Schrödinger asked the question: "How does the living organism avoid decay?" The obvious answer is: "By eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating." While energy from nutrients is necessary to sustain an organism's order, Schrödinger also presciently postulated the existence of other molecules equally necessary for creating the order observed in living organisms:
> "An organism's astonishing gift of concentrating a stream of order on itself and thus escaping the decay into atomic chaos – of drinking orderliness from a suitable environment – seems to be connected with the presence of the aperiodic solids..." We now know that this "aperiodic" crystal is DNA, and that its irregular arrangement is a form of information.
Thank you, I'm familiar with the work of Ilya Prigogine, and the first linked article is one of my favorites that I've read several times. The relationship between life and entropy is a fascinating topic for sure.
Oh I didn't notice you were getting downvoted up there in the parent comment, it wasn't me! :)
Anyway, I'm now going back to read Prigogine's book, Order Out of Chaos. It's also brought me around to think and study more about self-organization and emergent properties of complex systems.
About "A New Physics Theory of Life", and the idea that life exists because "the law of increasing entropy drives matter to acquire lifelike physical properties".. I see this is what you meant by "entropy is the process that drives life".
> Besides self-replication, greater structural organization is another means by which strongly driven systems ramp up their ability to dissipate energy. Thus, England argues that under certain conditions, matter will spontaneously self-organize.
Re-reading the article, I'm struck by how entropy and organization are, seemingly paradoxically, two sides of the same coin. It feels like there's something profound there, some principle that explains many phenomena at different scales all at once.
There is a minor pedantic point to make that akshually heat dissipation carves channels of energy flow that look to us like life rather than the causality going in the other direction.
