How Do You Say "Life" in Physics? - Issue 34: Adaptation

"To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life." Jeremy England is concerned about words--about what they mean, about the universes they contain. He avoids ones like "consciousness" and "information"; too loaded, he says. When he's searching for the right thing to say, his voice breaks a little, scattering across an octave or two before resuming a fluid sonority. The 34-year-old assistant professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the architect of a new theory called "dissipative adaption," which has helped to explain how complex, life-like function can self-organize and emerge from simpler things, including inanimate matter. This proposition has earned England a somewhat unwelcome nickname: the next Charles Darwin. But England's story is just as much about language as it is about biology. There are some 6,800 unique languages in use today.