Can life transcend physics?

We’re talking about life, the universe and everything – literally! My guest is cosmologist Marina Cortês of the University of Lisbon. Marina trained as a dancer before helping to shake up cosmology with some revolutionary ideas about the nature of time. As if that wasn’t enough – she’s now using the tools of theoretical physics to investigate the significance of life in the universe, in a new field that she and her colleagues call biocosmology. Marina’s work goes against many of the normal assumptions of physics. Put simply, you could see the conventional approach as attempting to describe everything in the universe through a set of fundamental laws and equations. And if something that we experience in the universe – like the forwards flow of time, say, or our ability to make our own choices – doesn’t fit into those equations, the mainstream view would be to say, well, that thing is an illusion. No matter how important it might seem to us, it doesn’t really exist.Marina is doing a different kind of cosmology, that puts life, and our experience of it, first. She’s asking, how can we use the mathematical tools of cosmology and theoretical physics to describe the universe we are actually living in? I think that’s such an exciting question, and it’s leading to some fascinating findings that could transform how we see life: from a process that simply shuffles atoms into different arrangements towards a force that continually rewrites the playing field, bursting beyond the fundamental equations and laws of physics to create completely new possibilities at every stage. I caught up with Marina for a tour of the “biocosmos”. Marina’s home pagehttps://marinacortes.org/ Introduction to biocosmologyhttps://marinacortes.org/cosmology-cortes-time-biocosmology-astrophysics-marina/#biocosmology Marina launching biocosmology from Everest base camphttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2HiNlqu0Lc Short talk by Marina on biocosmologyhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TH4UsyE3fo&t=3s 2023 paper on biocosmology by Marina, Stuart Kauffman, Andrew Liddle & Lee Smolinhttps://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09378 The universe as a process of unique events: 2014 paper by Marina Cortês & Lee Smolinhttps://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.90.084007 2021 paper on time and consciousness by Marina Cortês & Lee Smolinhttps://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/imp/jcs/2021/00000028/f0020009/art00004 *** To support us, please rate & review the show!*** Subscribe for new episodes every Mon*** Follow us on Instagram @wildthoughts_pod*** Edited highlights on YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhB4lyBDyjTliuz_h5oHwN6H8HoxS7qWL Where The Wild Thoughts Are is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yadahttps://www.yada-yada.net/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.