Molecular Storms review: Unsung physics helps unpick life’s complexity

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Liam Graham’s book is an ambitious, sometimes technical bid to explain how unflashy thermodynamics answers deep questions about the structure of our cells, Earth and the universe

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Water escaping via the plughole creates a low-entropy vortex

Judith Collins/Alamy

Molecular Storms
Liam Graham (Springer Link)

UNLIKE quantum or particle physics, thermodynamics rarely makes headlines, yet it is crucial for understanding how life arose and how the universe containing that life will end. This is at the heart of Molecular Storms: The physics of stars, cells and the origin of life by physicist-turned-economist Liam Graham.

His grand tour of the physical world leaves little unexamined, starting with simple systems of gas molecules in a box, moving to the smallest, simplest living cells,…

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