Death as Rising Entropy: A Theory of Everything for Postmortem Interval Estimation

Matteo Nioi

;Ernesto d' Aloja.

2025-01-01

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Abstract

Determining the postmortem interval remains one of the most persistent and fragmented challenges in forensic science. Conventional approaches—thermal, biochemical, molecular, or entomological—capture only isolated fragments of a single physical reality: the irreversible drift of a once-living system toward equilibrium. This Perspective proposes a unifying paradigm in which death is understood as a progressive rise in entropy, encompassing the loss of biological order across thermal, chemical, structural, and ecological domains. Each measurable postmortem variable—temperature decay, metabolite diffusion, macromolecular breakdown, tissue disorganization, and microbial succession—represents a distinct expression of the same universal law. Within this framework, entropy becomes a dimensionless index of disorder that can be normalized and compared across scales, transforming scattered empirical data into a coherent continuum. A Bayesian formulation further integrates these entropic signals according to their temporal reliability, yielding a probabilistic, multidomain equation for PMI estimation. By merging thermodynamics, information theory, and biology, the concept of death as rising entropy offers a comprehensive physical description of the postmortem process and a theoretical foundation for future computational, imaging, and metabolomic models in forensic time analysis.