Biology, long the domain of qualitative theories and experimental subjects that refuse to do the same thing twice, is now thoroughly data-driven. Propelled by the twentieth-century revolutions in molecular biology and computing, its emphasis has shifted from observing and describing to sequencing and calculating. In the process, biology has increasingly become like physics — a development that has caught the attention of quite a few physicists.
One such boundary-transcending thinker is the cosmologist and writer Paul Davies. His latest book, The Demon in the Machine, presents a case that information is central not just to doing biology, but to understanding life itself. He follows in esteemed footsteps. In 1943, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger delivered a landmark series of public lectures at Trinity College Dublin. Published the following year as What Is Life?, it explained many principles of molecular genetics — a decade before the structure of DNA was discovered (see P. Ball Nature 560, 548–550; 2018).
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