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The Physics of Life (ft. It's Okay to be Smart & PBS Eons!)

PBS Space Time · 770.7K views · 2018-04-11 · 13:41

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Overview

PBS Space Time, together with It's Okay to be Smart and PBS Eons, asks how a universe drifting toward disorder produced something as complex as life. It presents the idea that the laws of physics, through thermodynamics, may actually favor the emergence of life.

On Hacker News

HN commenters point to it as an accessible pop-science introduction to entropy and the physics of life, including Jeremy England's work.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2020–2023

Topics

Fundamental physicsBiology & biotechnology
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entropythermodynamicsorigin of lifejeremy englandphysics

What people said

donny2018 · 2023-12 · Recommendation

>but life organizes Yes, and that's the interesting part. In the right circumstances, more entropy doesn't mean less complexity. Matter can become more complex and less entropy locally if that results in increase of total entropy in the system. This can occur, for example, if we have constant flow of concentrated energy on some local areas of the environment that continuously wants to spread out. Because the system as a whole "wants" to maximize its entropy as fast as it can, and it statistically "searches" for the shortest paths possible. This may result in natural occurrence of more and more complex molecules that dissipate heat more and more efficiently. It's like the planet's atmospheric processes, for example. Where differences in heat concentration don't just spread out in linear gradients but can form complex structures like vortexes, hurricanes or even stable geometric hexagons (like the famous hexagon storm on Saturn), etc. >My view has always been that life fights against entropy. Yes, it "fights" against entropy to exist, but it exists solely by processing low entropy into high entropy. Maybe that's why it even exists in the first place? This part is better addressed in Jeremy England's work, for more basic explanations you can refer to videos like this: [VIDEO] (it's a very good video on this topic by PBS)

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efokschaner · 2021-10 · Recommendation

This subject is discussed in the pop sci work of PBS spacetime [VIDEO] with reference to articles and books if you're looking for more

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julienchastang · 2020-04 · Reference

I recently discovered the work of Jeremy England [1] on this topic on a PBS Space Time YouTube video [2] dedicated to the origins of life. England's work dates back a few years (2012) and seems like it was an exciting advancement in the field but was also controversial. Does anyone here know the status of this line of research? [1] [LINK] [2] [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by PBS Space Time, played through YouTube.

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