Town Hall Seattle Science Series

Explaining how and why our world works the way it does touches on so many fields of science: biology, chemistry, physics, and, of course, technology. However, according to researcher Blaise Agüera y Arcas, computation should also be part of the understanding of life on all levels – and going back further than one might think. In What Is Life? Evolution as Computation, Agüera y Arcas uses computation as a means of examining the complexities of our own universe. Inspired by the work of quantum mechanics pioneer Erwin Schrödinger, he revisits the question that has showcased the divide between biology and physics: what is life? How can life and all its attendant complexities come to exist in a random universe, governed by simple laws, whose disorder only increases over time? What Is Life? aims to provide surprising answers, reframing core concepts of self-reproduction, complex growth, and symbiotic relationships as inherently computational. Agüera y Arcas draws on decades of theory and existing literature from f