From Jim Stone
If bacteria can bypass the conventional sugar and oxygen lifestyle by living on electrons (19 July, p 8), could other bacteria live on an even more abstract diet of pure information?
According to physicist Rolf Landauer, each bit of Shannon’s information entropy can be traded for a small amount of Boltzmann-Gibbs thermodynamic entropy. In this case, organisms consume high-grade energy, such as sunlight, to create order (low information entropy).
So, roughly speaking, the electron-eating bacteria are already doing what all of life does: transforming low entropy, high-grade energy into biological order.
Sheffield, UK
