The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information Are Finally Solving the Mystery of Life

by PaulDavies (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2019

  $5.77

  When Darwin set out to explain the origins of living things, he made no attempt to answer the deeper question: what is life? For generations since, scientists have struggled to make sense of this central conundrum. For life really does look like magic, its secrets cloaked by a shroud of impenetrable complexity. Huge advances in biology over the past decades have served only to deepen the mystery: even a humble bacterium accomplishes things so dazzling that no human engineer can match it. But now an answer to the question is at hand, and it comes from a field of science so new and so fast-moving that it lacks a name, a domain where computing, chemistry, quantum physics and nanotechnology collide. The link that interweaves these diverse fields is information-not in the prosaic everyday sense, but as an abstract concept: information is a force as important, profound and physically impactful as energy. Its power to unify biology with physics heralds a new scientific revolution, poised to transform technology and medicine, and to illuminate the age-old question of whether we are alone in the universe. The Demon in the Machine is our very first, breath-taking journey through this revolutionary research. Pioneering physicist and astrobiologist Paul Davies takes us from primordial soup, photosynthesis and two-headed worms right up to the dizzy heights of consciousness, quantum mechanics, and avian navigation, to reveal how it is, exactly, that information defies the physical laws to create order from chaos-letting us in on the very secret of life itself.