Vanishing acts Book

I like the Victorian background of the story. The story is about a technique called nomenclature, which functions similar to a magic spell that can animate nonliving and possibly living beings. The idea of an animal can be developed from a lattice of single cells seems a fallacy to me, knowing that cells need to differentiate to form tissues then to organs and to a complete individual. Nevertheless, the story is a fiction and I like the logic coherence in the story line.

Apply nomenclature in living cells to enable cell growth. I call this technique as programmable cell biology. Nomenclature sounds essentially programming to me. Automatons, which are widely used in the story, are controllable robots. The author outlines the association among nomenclature, thermodynamics and life. Thermodynamically, life is a form of low degree of chaos and high degree of order. Likewise, nomenclature creates order in a lexical level. That's why people in the story believe that apply nomenclature allows to facilitate life.

It reminds me how programming allows order to be created, such as virtual apps, websites, etc. No one has ever explained this effect of lexical order in terms of thermodynamics, though it does make sense. Information can be explained in terms of thermodynamics, as we know from Shannon's information theory. Like any language, lexical order creates information. Then the question is, will information help create life?