The
negentropy, also
negative entropy,
syntropy,
extropy,
ectropy 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" was 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.