I've always thought that the reductionism versus emergence debate was kind of boring. But i wouldn't want to conflate it with the more kind of linguistic point about talking about things in biological terms first, physical terms. There are just some advantages that one language has over talking about the same phenomenon as another. And we need to recognize our own role in engaging in that work of translatWell, you're suggesting, or you're sort of hinting at a whole bunch of discussions people have had about reductionism and emergence and things like that. Do do I see any actual disagreement that we should, we should care about here? Well, i i try to take up early on in the
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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