A Groundbreaking Idea About Why Life Exists
Why does life exist? Popular hypotheses credit a primordial
soup, a bolt of lightning, and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative
new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according
to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of
life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising
as rocks rolling downhill.”
From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential
difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The
former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and
dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy
England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains
this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a
group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or
chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it
will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more
energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably
acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.
“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,”
His idea, detailed in a
paper and further elaborated in a talk he is delivering at
universities around the world, has sparked controversy among his colleagues,
who see it as either tenuous or a potential breakthrough, or both. England has taken “a very brave and very important
step,” said Alexander Grosberg, a professor of physics at New
York University who
has followed England ’s
work since its early stages. The “big hope” is that he has identified the
underlying physical principle driving the origin and evolution of life,
Grosberg said.
“Jeremy is just about the brightest young scientist I ever
came across,” said Attila Szabo, a biophysicist in the Laboratory of Chemical
Physics at the National Institutes of Health who corresponded with England
about his theory after meeting him at a conference. “I was struck by the originality
of the ideas.” Others, such as Eugene Shakhnovich, a professor of chemistry,
chemical biology and biophysics at Harvard
University , are not
convinced. “Jeremy’s ideas are interesting and potentially promising, but at
this point are extremely speculative, especially as applied to life phenomena,”
Shakhnovich said.
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