Astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, working on assembly theory and the physics of life.
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Their wordsPhysics hardly even acknowledges that the universe is random at its base. We like to think we live in a deterministic universe and everything’s deterministic. But I think that’s probably an artifact of the way that we’ve written down laws of physics since Newton invented modern physics and his conception of motion and gravity, which he formulated laws that had initial conditions and fixed dynamical laws.
Their wordsSo what’s fundamental, the way we talk about it in current physics is not actually fundamental, it’s the boundaries of what we can observe in our universe, what we can see with our technology.
Their wordsAnd then you can go to chemical system. I don’t think that’s good either. I think there’s a confusion because life emerges in chemistry that life is chemical. I don’t think life is chemical. I think life emerges in chemistry because chemistry is the first thing the universe builds where it cannot exhaust all the possibilities, because the combinatorial space of chemistry is too large.