Negentropy is short for negative entropy — the order a system imports to hold itself together against the universe’s relentless drift toward disorder.
In What Is Life? (1944), the physicist Erwin Schrödinger asked how living things resist decay. His answer: an organism stays alive by continually drawing “negative entropy” from its environment — feeding on order to keep its own entropy low. (Schrödinger later conceded that, writing for physicists, he might have said free energy instead — but he kept “negative entropy” because it was the more vivid image for a general reader.)
The compressed term negentropy was coined a decade later by Léon Brillouin, who tied it directly to information theory and built the bridge from thermodynamics to Claude Shannon. The full lineage runs:
Boltzmann (entropy, statistically) → Schrödinger (life as negative entropy) → Brillouin (negentropy and information) → Shannon (information as reduced uncertainty).
That chain is the scientific anchor of everything published here. To build and hold structure — in money, in politics, in consciousness, in technology — is to do negentropic work: order, sustained against decay, by design.
— Negentropy Press