Life, the universe and everything: an interview with Paul Davies

In an attempt to answer these big questions – what exactly is life, how and why does it emerge, and what distinguishes the living from the non-living – science writer and physicist Paul Davies offers his latest book, The Demon in the Machine: How Hidden Webs of Information are Solving the Mystery of Life. I think we begin to see that if information can have causal leverage over matter, then that opens the way to understanding how we might adapt the laws of physics to incorporate this information thing, which is at the heart of what makes life tick. If we are able to identify certain informational motifs or patterns that characterize living things, we could then have a definition: when you see this particular scaling law or this particular network of information flow – especially if we see that the information processing is being done in the global degrees of freedom, and not in the local – and there’s a coherent effect, that might be a hallmark of life.

Source: physicsworld.com