To A Physicist Life Looks Nothing Short

The Goldilocks Enigma Is The Idea That Everything In The Universe Is Just Right For Life, Like The Porridge In The Fairy Tale.

It Will Be In The Convergence Of Evolutionary Biology, Developmental Biology And Cancer Biology That The Answer To Cancer Will Lie. Nor Will This Confluence Be A One-way Street.

Mathematics Is Universal. It's Discovered By Human Beings, But The Rules Of Mathematics Are The Same Throughout The Universe And The Laws Of The Universe.

What We Want Is Another Sample Of Life, Which Is Not On Our Tree Of Life At All. All Life That We've Studied So Far On Earth Belongs To The Same Tree. We Share Genes With Mushrooms And Oak Trees And Fish And Bacteria That Live In Volcanic Vents And So On That It's All The Same Life Descended From A Common Origin. What We Want Is A Second Tree Of Life. We Want Alien Life, Alien Not Necessarily In The Sense Of Having Come From Space, But Alien In The Sense Of Belonging To A Different Tree Altogether. That Is What We're Looking For, "life 2.0."

The Secret Of Life Does Not Lie In Its Chemical Basis . . . Life Succeeds Precisely Because It Evades Chemical Imperatives.