Harold J. Morowitz, a boundlessly curious biophysicist who tackled mind-boggling enigmas ranging from the origin of life to the thermodynamics of pizza, died on March 22 in Falls Church, Va. He was 88.

The cause was sepsis, his son Noah said.

Trained as a physicist and a philosopher, Professor Morowitz was inspired in his scholarly speculation by the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the mid-20th-century Jesuit paleontologist who developed the idea of the Omega Point, his term for a level of spiritual consciousness and material complexity toward which he believed the universe was evolving.

Professor Morowitz’s intellectual scope extended beyond the laboratory. He was a consultant to NASA on experiments conducted remotely on the surface of Mars and inside Biosphere 2, the world’s largest enclosed ecosystem.

He was best known for applying thermodynamic theory to biology, exploring how “the energy that flows through a system acts to organize that system.”