‘ection 10.4 Thermodynamics of Living Systems 129 —_——— Heat in at temperature Ty Heat out at temperature Tz categorically that it j6 impossible, Heat can be paglially converted to worl igher quanti- }) that the: (10.1) work nly if the heat is rejecjéd into a reservoir at absgtute zero temperature. Althbugh objects can be cydled to within a very snfall fraction of absolute zexg, absolute zero cannoy/be attained. Therefore, héat cannot be completely converted into work. 10.4] Thermodynamics of Living Systems It is obvious that animals need food to live, but the reason for this is less obvious. The idea that animals need energy because they consume energy is, strictly speaking, incorrect. We know from the First Law of Thermodynamics130 Chapter 10. Thermodynamics that energy is conserved. The body does not consume energy, it changes it from one form to another. In fact, the first law could lead us to the erroneous conclusion that animals should be able to function without a source of external energy. The body takes in energy that is in the chemical bonds of the food molecules and converts it to heat, If the weight and the temperature of the body remain constant and if the body performs no external work, the energy input to the body equals exactly the heat energy leaving the body. We may suppose that if the heat outflow could be stopped—by good insulation, for example —the body could survive without food, As we know, this supposition is wrong. The need for energy is made apparent by examining the functioning of the body in the light of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, The body is a highly ordered system. A single protein molecule in the body may consist of a million atoms bound together in an ordered sequence. Cells are more complex still. Their specialized functions within the body de- pend on a specific structure and location, We know from the Second Law of ‘Thermodynamics that such a highly ordered system, left to itself, tends to be- come disordered, and once itis disordered, it ceases to function, Work must be done on the system continuously to prevent it from falling apart. For example, the blood circulating in veins and arteries is subject to friction, which changes kinetic energy to heat and slows the flow of blood. Ifa force were not applied to the blood, it would stop flowing in a few seconds. The concentration of minerals inside a cell differs from that in the surrounding environment, This Tepresents an ordered arrangement. The natural tendency is toward an equal- ization with the environment. Work must be done to prevent the contents of the cell from leaking out. Finally,.cells that die must be replaced, and if the animal is growing, new tissue must be manufactured, For such replacement and growth, new proteins and other cell constituents must be put together from smaller, relatively more random subcomponents. Thus, the process of life consists of building and maintaining ordered structures, In the face of the natural tendency toward disorder, this activity requires work. The situation is somewhat analogous to a pillar made of small, slippery, uneven blocks that tend to slide out of the structure. The pillar remains standing only if blocks are continuously pushed back. The work necessary to maintain the ordered structures in the body ig ob- tained from the chemical energy in food, Except for the energy utilized in external work done by the muscles, all the energy provided by food is ulti- mately converted into heat by friction and other dissipative processes in the body. Once the temperature of the body is at the desired level, all the heat generated by the body must leave through the various cooling mechanisms of the body (see Chapter 11). The heat must be dissipated because, unlike heat engines (such as the turbine or the steam engine), the body does not have the ability to obtain work from heat energy. The body can obtain work onlyjoNaL DE COLOMBIA, BIBLIOTECAS “EFE” GOMEZ 131 Section 10.4 Thermodynamics of Living SyatéifO- DEE BIBLIOTECA from chemical energy. Even if the body did have mechanisms for using heat to perform work, the amount of work it could obtain in this way would be small. Once again, the second law sets the limit. The temperature differences in the body are small—not more than about 7 C° between the interior and the exterior. With the interior temperature T; at 310 K (37 °C) and the exterior temperature Ty at 303 K, the efficiency of heat conversion to work would be (from Eq. 10.1) at most only about 2%, Of all the various forms of energy, the body can utilize only the chemical binding energy of the molecules which constitute food.. The body does not have a mechanism to convert the other forms of energy into work. A person could bask in the sun indefinitely; receiving large quantities of radiant energy, and yet die of starvation. Plants, on the other hand, are able to utilize radiant energy. As animals use chemical energy, so plants utilize solar radiation to Provide the energy for the ordering processes necessaiy for life. The organic materials produced in the life cycle of plants provide food energy for herbivorous animals, which in turn are food for the carnivorous animals that eat them. The sun is, thus, the ultimate source of energy for life on Earth Since living systems create order out of relative disorder (for example, by synthesizing large complex molecules out of randomly arranged subunits), it may appear at first glance that they violate the Second Law of Thermody- namics, but this is not the ease, To ascertain that the second law is valid, we must examine the whole process of life, which includes not only the living unit but also the energy that it consumes and the by-products that it rejects, To begin with, the food that is consumed by an animal contains a consid. erable degree of order. The atoms in the food molecules are not randomly irranged but are ordered in specific patterns. Whe the chemical energy in the molecular bindings of the food is released, the ordered structures are bro- ken down, The eliminated waste products are considerably more disordered than the food taken in. The ordered chemical energy is converted by the body into disordered heat energy. The amount of disorder in a system can be expressed quantitatively by means of a concept called entropy. Calculations show that, in all cases, the increase in the entropy (disorder) in the surroundings produced by the living System is always greater than the decrease in entropy (ic, ordering) obtained in the living system itself, The total process of life, therefore, obeys the second law. Thus, living systems are perturbations in the ow toward disorder. They Keep themselves ordered for a while at the expense of the environment, This isa difficult task requiring the use of the most complex mechanisms found in nature. When these mechanisms fail, as they eventually must, the order falls apart, and the organism dies.432 Chapter 10 Thermodynamics 10.5} Information and the Second Law We have stressed earlier that work must be done to create and maintain the highly ordered local state of life. We now turn to the question, what else is needed for such local ordering to occur? Perhaps we can get an insight into this issue from a simple everyday experience. In the course of time, our apartment becomes disordered. Books, which had been placed neatly, in alphabetical order, on a shelf in the living room, are now strewn on the table and some are even under the bed. Dishes that were clean and neatly stacked in the cupboard, are now dirty with half-eaten food and are on the living room table. We decide to clean up, and in 15 minutes or so the apartment is back in order, The books are neatly shelved, and the dishes are clean and stacked in the kitchen, The apartment is clean, Two factors were necessary for this process to occur, Firs, as was already slated, energy was required to do the work of gathering and stacking the books and cleaning and ordering the dishes. Second, and just as important, informa. tion was required to direct the work in the appropriate direction, We had to know where to place the books and how to clean the dishes and stack them, just so. The concept of information is of central importance here. In the 1940s, Claude Shannon developed a quantitative formulation for the amount of information available in a given system, Shannon’s formula for information content is shown to be equivalent to the formula for entropy —the measure of disorder—except, with a negative sign. This mathematical insight formally shows that if energy and information are available, the entropy in a given locality can be decreased by the amount of information available to engage in the process of ordering. In other words, as in our example of the messy living room, order can be created in a disordered system by work that is directed by appropriate information. The second law, of course, remains valid: the overall entropy of the universe increases. The work required to perform the ordering, one way or another, causes a greater disorder in the Surroundings than the order that was created in the system itself. It is the availability of information and energy that allows living systems to replicate, grow, and maintain their structures. The chain of life begins with plants that possess information in their ge- netic material on how to utilize the energy fromr the sun to make highly or- dered complex structures from the simple molecules available to them: prin- cipally water, carbon dioxide, and an assortment of minerals, The process is, in essence, similar in human beings and other animals, All the information re- quired for the function of the organism is contained in the intricate structure of DNA. The human DNA consists of about a billion molecular units in a well- determined sequence. Utilizing the energy obtained from the food that is con.Chapter 10 Exercises 133 sumed by the organism, the information in the DNA guides the assembly of the various proteins and enzymes required for the functioning of the organism, > EXERCISES > es 10-1. Explain how the second law of thermodynamics limits conversion of heat to work, 10-2. From your own experience, give an example of the second law of thermo- dynamics 10-3, Describe the connections between information, the second law of thermo- dynamics, and living systems.