The Picture by Dan Brown

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The name of your book, the picture, appears in dan brown's novel called origin. You had no idea writ ofme. He didn't talk to you, and you wereo nohe asked me a to have lunch with him a month before the book came out. And soaattthat was one of the more surprising things that happened to me so far in my scientific career. I think especially being portrayed as someone who wasn't interested in the broader discussion really made me feel like i really am interested in the wider discussion.

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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