What's the Meaning of Life? Physics.
A revolutionary law of physics explains it all—sports and technology, air currents and population growth, migration and social hierarchy.
When you think of physics, what comes to mind? Atomic energy? Gravitational waves? Maybe Newtonian equations?
Bejan isn’t the first person to study behavior as physics, or to use physics to describe wider systems. But his new book, The Physics of Life: The Evolution of Everything, may be the broadest consideration yet. Harking back to the original definition of the discipline—“knowledge of nature” in Greek—he ultimately concludes that “life and evolution are physics.”
To wrap our heads around this counterintuitive premise, National Geographic recently spoke with Bejan about the physics of life, the universe, and everything.
Absolutely. Our narrow definition of the discipline is something that’s happened in the past hundred years, thanks to the immense impact of Albert Einstein and atomic physics and relativity at the turn
