47:04Jim Al-Khalili's Guide To Life: Universe And Everything
Jim Al-Khalili builds one argument out of four sciences: the universe does not need a designer to produce a human being, it needs a temperature gradient, a feedback loop and enough time. He walks thermodynamics from Sadi Carnot's steam engines to Clausius's entropy and the heat death, then flips the second law over to show that the running down of the cosmos is exactly what powers everything interesting, from a car engine to a chocolate bar to a biosphere. Chaos theory supplies the mechanism for complexity (Lorenz, the butterfly effect, Mandelbrot and fractals), and quantum mechanics supplies a candidate mechanism for mutation: a proton tunnelling inside a DNA hydrogen bond, which is Al-Khalili's own research at Surrey with Johnjoe McFadden. The last twelve minutes go to the origin of life, with convection cells in a frying pan, five self-organising robots called smarticles, Lee Cronin's Genesis engines in Glasgow and Sara Walker arguing that physics has not yet invented the right shape of theory. This is episode two of the 2021 MagellanTV series, and the page rebuilds all 47 minutes in order.
