The Evolution of a System

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The masses and springs are these kind of dumb, inert particles that just have the ability to entangle and disentangle from each other. And then they form this kind of mesh of resinator of different random connections between balls and springs. And then you can take a piece of that and start shaking it. And you can shake it at apart frequency, for example. So if you didn't shake it, you would just get thermal equilibrium. Youd just get some random mess of balls hooking and unhooking from each other with springs. But once you start shaking part of the system and you choose, for example, a particular frequency, now you have energy flowing in from the forcing

Erwin Schrödinger’s famous book What Is Life? highlighted the connections between physics, and thermodynamics in particular, and the nature of living beings. But the exact connections between living organisms and the flow of heat and entropy remains a topic of ongoing research. Jeremy England is a leader in this field, deriving connections between thermodynamic relations and the processes of life. He is also an ordained rabbi who finds resonances between modern science and passages in the Hebrew Bible. We talk about it all, from entropy fluctuation theorems to how scientists should approach religion.

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Jeremy England received his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University. He is currently Senior Director in the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning group at GlaxoSmithKline. He has been a Rhodes scholar, a Hertz fellow, and was named one of Forbes‘s “30 Under 30 Rising Stars of Science.” His new book is Every Life is on Fire: How Thermodynamics Explains the Origins of Living Things.

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