Physicists, chemists, and biologists, although not rejecting these notions, do not make them part of the inspiration of their working lives. Their response is like that of a wealthy congregation to the exhortations of their priest on the virtues of poverty. It is something felt to be good, but not a way of life for the next week. Living organisms are open systems in the sense that they take and excrete energy and matter. If life is defined as a self-organizing system characterized by an actively sustained low entropy, then, viewed from outside each of these boundaries, what lies within is alive.
Dissipative structures are doubly dissipative.
The structures dissipate heat and they themselves dissipate when the source of external energy is removed. Self-organizing phenomena provide a useful image for answering this question. After all, the intricate patterns of eddies and vortices characteristic of turbulence must also subsist in the midst of tumult.