Energy Isn't a Bull in a China Shop, Right?

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If i dump energy into a system and just give it to parts of the system in no particular way, i'm going to be activating bunch of different random rearrangements in different parts. And in a living thing, we call that damage. So if you start doing the more random exploration of the space of possibilities there, you're going to stop being a frog, or you're gonna end up as a pile of carbon with no particular providence. If you have a patterned input, such as a particular frequency, and you take a disordered set of interacting pieces that have lots of different possible ways of liking to move with the environment, depending on what corner of their configuration space they

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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