What is life? : spontaneous directional motion in the molecular storm

The process of life was described by physicist Erwin Schrödinger as the spontaneous creation of order in a universe characterized by increasing disorder – he referred to this as ‘negative entropy’. Recent knowledge of the molecular machines that perform work inside cells is revealing that disorderly ‘positive entropy’ is not inimical to life but is actually the force that sets life in motion: molecular machines perform unidirectional actions and create order driven partly by a storm of molecular movement resulting from thermal agitation. I will present details of these essential living processes and a modern definition of the word ‘life’. As entropy is a universal phenomenon and around 5% of the star systems so far examined host planets in a zone of thermal agitation suitable for organic life, I will present the case that life is almost certainly extremely common throughout the universe. I will present a realistic view of life on these worlds. By the end of the seminar participants will understand what it is exactly that makes them living beings, and they will appreciate how the vast timescales involved in the evolution of complex, multi-cellular, sentient organisms makes them a particularly rare and special manifestation of life in the universe.