For one thing, the organization of living matter defies physicists’ usual expectations about the universe. Your body is made of matter, just like everything else. But the atoms you’re built from today won’t be the atoms you’re built from in a year. That means you and every other living thing aren’t an inert object, like a rock, but a dynamic pattern playing out over time. The real challenge for physics, however, is that the patterns that make up life are self-organized. Living systems both create and maintain themselves in a strange kind of loop that no existing machine can replicate. Think about the cell membrane, which enables a cell to stay alive by letting some chemicals in while keeping others out. The cell creates and continually maintains the membrane, but the membrane is also itself a process that makes the cell.
— Read on www.theatlantic.com/science/2025/12/physics-life-reductionism-complexity/685257/
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