- cattening
- The process that filters which structures persist and which don't — collapsing, ordering, foreclosing alternatives, the way a canyon forecloses every path but the one it has cut. It reduces entropy; the opposite operation, forcing novelty open, is Pandoric.
- chao (χ)
- How much energy the surroundings deliver in the time a system holds together, divided by what it costs to escape its current arrangement. Below 1 nothing moves. Above 1 things break loose. Written χ = Φτ/ΔG.
- Cheshiring
- What persists after the thing that made it is gone, and constrains the next round — the grin left after the Cheshire Cat. Canalising cuts down; Cheshiring is what the cut leaves behind.
- dissipation
- Taking in usable energy and shedding it as heat. Everything alive does this constantly — it is the cost of staying complicated.
- doggening
- A term or process whose everyday meaning has overwhelmed its technical one. Used both as a process-verb and, reflexively, as a diagnostic flag inside the lexicon itself for exactly that failure.
- entropy production rate
- The housekeeping cost of merely staying in a steady state — nonzero for as long as the state holds, even while nothing about it appears to change.
- FUCA
- First Universal Common Ancestor. The earliest thing in the lineage. Between FUCA and LUCA, a great deal happened and almost nothing survives to tell us what.
- LUCA
- Last Universal Common Ancestor. The most recent organism from which every living thing descends. Not the first life — the last shared one.
- Lyapunov exponent
- Whether nearby starting points drift apart over time or collapse together. Negative: the system forgets and settles. Positive: small differences blow up. Zero: the critical line between them.
- Pandæmonium
- χ ≫ 1 — the top of the chao scale, where every axis is driven at once and every accessible phase change gets explored. An asteroid impact, not a single overtopped channel.
- serpentinisation
- Seawater reacting with deep crustal rock, producing hydrogen and heat for as long as the rock lasts. A power supply that needs no sunlight and does not switch off.
- throughflow
- Energy passing continuously through a system rather than sitting in it. A river, not a reservoir.
- vesicle
- A small sac with a fatty skin. The simplest kind of container a cell could have started as — and it forms on its own, given the right water.