On the Irreversible Journey of Matter, Life and Human Culture

Following in the footsteps of Schrödinger, we propose a unified view of matter, life and human culture, with particular emphasis on the role played by the second law of thermodynamics and the primordial matter–antimatter separation. In doing so, we highlight the fragility of ‘construction’ (order) and the robustness of ‘destruction’ (chaos), when they locally and contextually face each other within a same reality layer, and the power of ‘construction’ versus the weakness of ‘destruction’, when they oppose each other at the global historical level, which is a result of the irreversible choices that were made by ‘matter, life and human culture’ in the course of their evolution.