That was the question that Edwin Schrödinger (him of the famous cat) tried to answer in his 1944 book of the same name. What, he wondered, was the difference between something living and something non-living? It’s one of those questions that should be simple but really isn’t.

But as powerful as the book was, 75 years after its publication no foundational physical laws for life have ever been found. There is no F=ma or E=mc2 or even a Schrödinger’s equation for living systems. In spite of decades of searching, physicists have been unable to fully “reduce” the domains of the biologist (cells and organs and ecologies) into the domains of their own (atoms and energy and forces).

What is life? Why cells and atoms haven’t answered the question.

So some clever people are looking at the possibility that matter becomes more complex as it conveys more information.

What has become clear to scientists like Paul Davies, Sara Walker, and Lee Cronin, who are working across domains, is that understanding life requires putting a new actor onto the stage and letting it take the lead. That actor is information. Rather than focusing on the mechanics of life—meaning how the laws of atoms can be built up into a living organism—researchers are beginning to see that what really matters is how atoms and molecules become conduits for complex flows of information. Rather than just thinking about forces or energy exchanges between molecular parts, the key becomes seeing the whole; seeing how these parts can be seen as something more, something that only emerges when information becomes important to a system…Without doubt, life is a physical system, but by creating and then harnessing intricate ballets of information flows, life does something amazing: it creates. 

The question of where does something like information comes from and how that happened to be coded into the fundamental principles of the universe is not likely to prove any easier to answer. The idea that information which has the ability, when coupled to matter, to create new combinations of matter that would change that thing from non-living to living and ultimately conscious and that just happened seems to stretch credibility. I’ll admire the faith of anyone who believes it.

Compared to that, the idea that a creator created and endowed certain elements of creation with life and separated it from non-living seems the more simple option.