Life's Chemical Secret

How the ground-breaking discovery of a new material form in chemistry—matter in a dynamic kinetic state—is helping to explain life’s unique characteristics.

The materialist view of nature has guided scientific thinking since Galileo—reality can be measured, modeled, and explained. Nature is objective. But our everyday life experiences just don’t seem to fit in with that view. Purpose, desire, and consciousness are real, but not objective. How could natural processes have led to such unnatural consequences? The physical nature of living matter, a material form that has totally overwhelmed our planet, remains inexplicably unresolved. Biology, never mind psychology, simply does not make basic physical sense. Until now.

In Life’s Chemical Secret, Addy Pross offers at last a scientific explanation for life’s greatest puzzle. Through the discovery of a new dimension in chemical possibility, Pross and his collaborators have opened a new door to understanding life’s fundamental nature. The emergence of cognition, mind, and purpose is now comprehensible through the existence of dynamic kinetic states of matter. Some four billion years after life on earth first appeared, living forms can now understand how the universe was able to discover itself.Addy Pross is Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva. His research focuses on the origin of life problem and the nature of the chemistry-biology interface. He is the author of Theoretical and Physical Principles of Chemical Reactivity and What Is Life? and a coeditor of Evolution on Purpose (MIT Press).