★★★★★ The Meaning of Life

Life and Energy

Isaac Asimov

Life and Energy is literally about the meaning of life. That is, in this book Isaac Asimov sets himself the central task of producing a definition of "life". When I read Life and Energy I imagined that this was a central question in biology, one that Serious Biologists thought about. When eventually I myself became a Serious Biologist I discovered that the definition of "life" is not a question Serious Biologists spend much if any time thinking about. We know in great detail what viruses, cells, etc are, so if you give us an unambiguous definition, we can tell you instantly which things satisfy that definition.

I read Life and Energy in 1973, as a junior in high school. I remember this precisely, because I was at the time entering a program that would allow me to skip my senior year of high school and start my first year of college immediately. I had taken high school biology and physics, but never chemistry, so I needed to fix that. I read the textbook used in our high school chemistry course, and I read Life and Energy, which was far more helpful and informative.

Life and Energy is an exceptionally clearly written explanation of thermodynamics and its application to biology. From this I learned that forces push things towards states of low potential energy -- this is essentially the definition of "potential energy" -- although that was not an idea I had ever understood from my high school physics class. Thermodynamics defines a thing called free energy (G = Gibbs free energy, more precisely), and any system of chemical reactions will tend towards the state of lowest free energy. This is a fundamental unifying concept of biochemistry and more generally biology. Thus the definition of life that Asimov eventually arrives at has to do with how living things manipulate energy,

Sadly, the book is out of print. There was at one point a Kindle edition, but that, too, is no longer available. Still, if you have access to a university library, you can probably find it there.

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