Origins of life, intelligent life, and physics connections; testing England’s thermodynamic theories

Investigate the origins of life and the origins of intelligent life by elucidating the connections between life and the laws of physics, and empirically test Jeremy England’s thermodynamic theories linking self-organization, self-replication, and adaptation to thermodynamic principles such as fluctuation–dissipation, potentially by using thermodynamic AI machines as simulators for complex fluctuating systems.

Background

The paper proposes Thermodynamic AI as a unified framework and hardware paradigm that leverages physical stochasticity and a Maxwell’s demon component to accelerate and integrate several AI algorithms. In motivating the broader scientific potential of such machines, the authors note that large-scale thermodynamic AI devices could act as simulators for complex fluctuating systems, suggesting a route to study deep scientific questions beyond AI.

Within this context, the authors explicitly state that many questions about the origins of life, the origins of intelligent life, and their connections to the laws of physics remain open, including the possibility of testing Jeremy England’s thermodynamic theories that connect life’s hallmarks (self-organization, self-replication, adaptation) to fluctuation–dissipation. The paper highlights the prospect that thermodynamic AI machines may provide appropriate “apple-to-apple” simulators for such investigations.