“Self-replication is a capacity common to every species of living thing, and simple physical intuition dictates that such a process must invariably be fueled by the production of entropy. Here, we undertake to make this intuition rigorous and quantitative by deriving a lower bound for the amount of heat that is produced during a process of self-replication in a system coupled to a thermal bath. We find that the minimum value for the physically allowed rate of heat production is determined by the growth rate, internal entropy, and durability of the replicator, and we discuss the implications of this finding for bacterial cell division, as well as for the pre-biotic emergence of self-replicating nucleic acids.”

“As physicists, we can look at this collection of particles, and instead of seeing this ‘living thing’ sitting on water, we might instead say that there are a bunch of different locations of particles, and distances between them, and periods of time that pass between when particles are located in one place and another, and counting things, and measuring things like energy and temperature. Energy, also, if you look at the units, can be reduced to a counting of particles, time, and distance.

The point I want to make is that a priori, life is total absent from the physical properties of the system. Physics doesn’t make any distinction between particles that are in the whale and particles that are around it, it’s all just a bunch of positions and momenta, and presumably there’s some equation of motion we could write down, that’s a good model of how they evolve over time. Whether we’re looking at something that is alive or not is not something I would argue that those basic physical descriptors can tell us.”

“We can, indeed, kill all organic beings and thus render them inorganic at will. But these changes are not the same as those which we induce in a piece of chalk by pouring sulphuric acid upon it; in this case we only change the form, and the inorganic matter remains. But when we pour sulphuric acid upon a worm, or when we burn an oak-tree, these organisms are not changed into some other animal and tree, but they disappear entirely as organized beings and are resolved into inorganic elements.”

— August Weismann (1889), Essay on Heredity

“When I kick a stone, I give energy to the stone, and it moves with that energy … When I kick a dog, it responds with energy [it received] from [its] metabolism.”

— Gregory Bateson (1972), truncated version by Fritjof Capra (1996) [9]

“The theory for the origin and evolution of life as presented above and accredited to Jeremy England is not new. It was published by myself in 2009 (“Thermodynamic Origin of Life” (Ѻ)) and in 2011 (“Thermodynamic Dissipation Theory for the Origin of Life” (Ѻ)). The observation that under a generalized chemical potential, material self-organizes into systems which augment the dissipation of that potential should be accredited to Ilya Prigogine, Introduction to Thermodynamics of Irreversible Processes (1968).”

“Very recently, research led by MIT physicist Jeremy England suggests that life may happen automatically, a result of physics, specifically thermodynamics. England argues that molecules assemble themselves in the most energy-efficient way they can find. Molecules may be driven to seek thermodynamic equilibrium, and that my lead to 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.”

— Jeremy England (2014), interview commentary with Natalie Wolchover [2]