The difference between looking at the world as a physicist or looking at theworld as a biologist, you have different categories and different vocabularies in how you make sense of the same phenomenon. In present day biology, there's a huge amount of quantification that goes on, and it's very useful for addressing certain kinds of questions. But if you go back to the beginning, the idea of what is alive is something taken for granted at the outset in biology. You can't getp going without starting to talk about the world in terms of numbers that you make out of it.
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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