Life #1 - Dead, Alive and Other States
When I was a kid, I remember the Big Book of Amazing Facts startled me when it said there was no definition for the term “life”. How can a term life “life” not have a definition? Now, as an adult, I found myself reading Carl Zimmer’s book on the same theme – that life defies definition. In Life’s Edge , Zimmer starts with the contradiction. Even babies follow dots on a screen that seem to move with a purpose but not dots moving randomly: “Our knowledge of life… arises long before we can tell ourselves what we know.” If something can live, it has two states, right? Alive or dead. Think again. Take the tiny animalcules that Antony Van Leeuwenhoek, the inventor of the microscope, found in water. If he let the water evaporate, most animalcules would burst (and die) as they dried. But not all. Some animalcules didn’t burst – it shrank into a smaller version of itself and became motionless. If he doused them with water weeks later , they unfolded their bodies and “came alive”....