The Second Law of Thermodynamics can be stated as: generating information also generates waste. All living things are constantly generating “information” (that’s what being alive implies!), and consequently must produce waste (which we can reasonably accurately also call “poo”). Physicists (and chemists) call this waste “entropy”. Using their Quantitative Geometrical Thermodynamics (QGT) [1] formalism, Parker & Jeynes [2] have recently proved that, just as energy is conserved, so also entropy production is a conserved quantity in any closed system. Of course, poo is produced in one form or another by all living things which, as one of the ways of excreting entropy, is required by the physics. This has been known qualitatively for some time, but a well-defined quantitative approach has not been available until now.

The QGT formalism [1] rigorously shows how to combine information and entropy into a new quantity info-entropy, using the standard tools of mathematical physics (the Lagrangian, the Liouvillian etc.). It turns out that the entropic Uncertainty relations are readily derived from the entropic Liouville Theorem [3]. Info-entropy is of fundamental importance, and is built on the conventional methods of information science: “Shannon entropy” and Edwin Jaynes’ “Maximum Entropy”.

Arguably the most fundamental of all physical theories, thermodynamics is intrinsically scale-less and should apply from the sub-nuclear to the cosmic. We have demonstrated that it applies to the galactic, including black holes and the geometry of spiral galaxies [1,2], and we have also demonstrated that exactly the same formalism applies to nuclear entities. In particular, we have calculated the correct sizes of various interesting sub-atomic nuclei (including 4He, 6He, 8He) without using any quantum mechanics at all [4].

This treatment not only opens up fundamentally new ways of approaching a wide range of currently intractable problems, but also focusses attention on “non-local” effects (including the “entanglement” essential to quantum cryptography) allowing a deeper insight into the representation of reality [5] and thereby bringing some basic questions into sharp focus, including an entirely new physical approach to integrity. In the postwar period it has been unfashionable to consider the philosophical questions suggested by the physics, but today this seems to be changing.

Reality is certainly elusive: Carlo Rovelli famously said that “reality is not what it seems”, and leading physicists have asserted that “time is an illusion”. But we think that this new thermodynamics also encourages a new confidence in the reality of reality (including time!).