Is It Possible to Predict What to Expect?

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If i don't have an external environment that pushes on me with some pattern forcing, then all i can really do is roll downhill and get kicked randaly back up hill. So it's just the classic trade off between low energy and high entropy. But if i now start pushing on the system with an external source of work, the way i should think about how this game changes is now it's like i've put skey lifts or escalators in this landscape. And there are particular configurations i can be in where the way they absorb energy from the environment is have an impact ant how much they can get lifted up some mountain side and dropped down the other. That's important because if you

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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