Life As No One Knows It

What is life? This is among the most difficult open problems in science, right up there with the nature of consciousness and the existence of matter. All the definitions we have fall short. None help us understand how life originates or the full range of possibilities for what life on other planets might look like.

In LIFE AS NO ONE KNOWS IT, physicist and astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker argues that solving the origin of life requires radical new thinking and an experimentally testable theory for what life is. This is an urgent issue for efforts to make life from scratch in laboratories here on Earth and missions searching for life on other planets.

Walker proposes a new paradigm for understanding what physics encompasses and what we recognize as life. She invites us into a world of maverick scientists working without a map, seeking not just answers but better ways to formulate the biggest questions we have about the universe. The book culminates with the bold proposal of a new theory for identifying and classifying life, one that applies not just to biological life on Earth but to any instance of life in the universe. Rigorous, accessible, and vital, LIFE AS NO ONE KNOWS IT celebrates the mystery of life and the explanatory power of physics.

Reading LIFE AS NO ONE KNOWS IT is like engaging in a mind-bending conversation about the biggest questions of all -- Tim Urban creator of Wait But Why
With wit and clarity, Walker outlines a radical new approach to bridge the conceptual gap between non-life and life -- Paul Davies author of WHAT’S EATING THE UNIVERSE and THE DEMON IN THE MACHINE
Walker's defence of her 'assembly theory' is a virtuoso intellectual performance ... full of wit, mischief and bursts of insolent brevity, which for newcomers to this territory are like oases in the desert. Walker shows us that what we call 'life' is but an infinitesimal fraction of all the kinds of like that may arise out of any number of wholly unfamiliar chemistries -- Simon Ings Daily Telegraph
An honorable addition to a small genre that began with Noble Prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrodinger's WHAT IS LIFE? ... Ingenious Kirkus Reviews
LIFE AS NO ONE KNOWS IT is a masterfully crafted and engaging account of Assembly Theory - a theory of the physics of life that promises to lead us toward a fundamentally new avenue of scientific exploration. Assembly Theory might not only help us understand what life is, but develop the scientific tools needed to recognize and locate life elsewhere in the universe, giving us a better understanding of everything from the quantum realm, to life, to consciousness. I highly recommend LIFE AS NO ONE KNOWS IT to anyone interested in fundamental physics, the origins of life, and pursuing a better understanding of the structure underlying all of the universe's creations -- Annaka Harris, New York Times bestselling author of CONSCIOUS: A BRIEF GUIDE TO THE FUNDAMENTAL MYSTERY OF THE MIND
Bracingly original ... This has the potential to be a game changer Publishers Weekly

Sara Imari Walker is Associate Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration, Deputy Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science, and Associate Director of the ASU-Santa Fe Institute Center for Biosocial Complex Systems at Arizona State University. Originally trained in theoretical physics and Cosmology at Dartmouth College, she is a leading young intellectual in the pursuit of understanding life and finding it on other worlds. She has published research on topics as diverse as chemical evolution, foundations of quantum mechanics, major evolutionary transitions, cancer biology and exoplanet science, but her central focus continues to be solving the problem of what life is.

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