Page "Negentropy" Paragraph 0

The negentropy, also negative entropy or syntropy or extropy or entaxy, of a living system is the entropy that it exports to keep its own entropy low ; it lies at the intersection of entropy and life.

The concept and phrase " negative entropy " were introduced by Erwin Schrödinger in his 1944 popular-science book What is Life?

Later, Léon Brillouin shortened the phrase to negentropy, to express it in a more " positive " way: a living system imports negentropy and stores it.

In 1974, Albert Szent-Györgyi proposed replacing the term negentropy with syntropy.

That term may have originated in the 1940s with the Italian mathematician Luigi Fantappiè, who tried to construct a unified theory of biology and physics.

Buckminster Fuller tried to popularize this usage, but negentropy remains common.