A few
years back, an incredible new theory made its way into the scientific zeitgeist
– i.e., that life is an inevitable consequence of physics. The author of this theory,
an associate professor of biophysics at MIT named Jeremy England, has now published
the first key papers testing out this hypothesis, and it’s seems like he might
be right on the money.
England’s
hypothesis is a vital bridge between physics and biology. Although it’s not yet
decisively proven, it potentially holds the key to responding one of the utmost
questions of all: Where did we come from?
Here’s
what his work is arguing. Thanks to the second law of thermodynamics, the
universe is heading towards a state of complete structural chaos. It’s tumbling
towards a state where everything is basically the same no matter how the
constituent parts are arranged.
This is called
“maximum entropy”, where everything on an energy level is stable, everywhere.
Right now,
though, there are pockets of order, of low entropy – objects and things that
cannot be atomically reorganized and still be the same thing (planets and life,
for example). They are the exclusions to an increasingly chaotic universe,
something first underlined by Schrodinger’s seminal 1944 essay What Is Life?
Think of a
pool of water with three color dyes dropped in it. Originally, they stay as
separate dots far apart, but with time, the colors spread out, mix, and in the
end, there’s just one particular color. That’s the universe; the dots, in this
case, can be pockets of biological life.
A somewhat
wonderful explanation of entropy. BBC via YouTube
England is
proposing that biology arises because, in definite environments – like on
planets – where the energy equilibrium is so out of whack, physics guarantees
that atoms reorder themselves to be able to deal with the disordered flow of
energy. These atomic structures just happen to resemble what we called “life”.
References:
https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/was-life-an-inevitable-outcome-of-thermodynamics/
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