In 1943 the Nobel prizewinning physicist Erwin Schrödinger delivered a series of lectures at Trinity College Dublin. His topic was not the nascent field that he had helped to create, quantum mechanics, but the fundamentals of biology. “What is life?” he asked.

At the time, it felt as though biology was lagging far behind physics — the double-helix structure of DNA had yet to be elucidated and scientists had little idea how even the basic functions of life worked on a molecular level. Even more awkwardly, life seemed to defy one of the most cherished tenets of physics, the second law of thermodynamics.

That law states, in its simplest terms, that any closed system must become more disordered over time. Yet the processes of life