120 | Jeremy England on Biology, Thermodynamics, and the Bible

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 26 October 2020

⏱️ 89 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host John Carroll.
0:04.3	Long time listeners will know that there are two things I'm really interested in.
0:08.1	One is entropy. I mean, there's more than two things. I like to think. But anyway, two of them
0:12.5	entropy, the arrow of time, right? How entropy increases over time in the language of
0:18.0	statistical mechanics and why that draws a distinction between the past and the future.
0:23.0	And then separately, but in a related sense, life, the idea of biological life, the origin of life,
0:29.2	the evolution of life. So it's very natural, and we've done it before, to bring these two
0:33.9	things together because living systems are physical systems. They obey the laws of physics.
0:39.2	And so it's they're out of equilibrium systems. They're systems that are open and interact
0:43.3	with their environment. And they take part in. They participate in the overall increase of entropy
0:49.1	in the universe. So today's guest is one of the world's leaders in thinking about this intersection
0:54.3	of statistical mechanics and entropy with life, both its origin and its evolution and its
1:00.2	functioning on a day-to-day basis. Jeremy England is well known, especially to readers of Quanta
1:05.4	magazine. Quanta, which is one of my favorite science magazines, has profiled Jeremy and talked
1:10.4	about his work a lot. What he's doing is taking modern advances in non-equilibrium statistical
1:17.4	mechanics that is to say, not just the simple fact that entropy increases, but the ways in which it
1:22.7	increases and the fluctuations around the overall tendency to increase, and applies them to what
1:29.0	life is, how it operates, how it originated. But there's a twist to this story. I mean,
1:34.8	Jeremy will be very obvious mindscape guests, but the twist is the following. Jeremy is also in
1:39.8	ordained rabbi in the Orthodox Jewish tradition. And in his new book called Every Life is on Fire,
1:46.6	how thermodynamics explains the origins of living things. Jeremy does not shy away from talking
1:53.0	about the relationship in his mind between his Jewish faith and the words that he reads and the
	...

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