Paul Falkowski looks "under the hood" of microbes to find the engines of life, the actual working parts that do the biochemical heavy lifting for every living organism on Earth. With insight and humor, he explains how these miniature engines are built - and how they have been appropriated by and assembled like Lego sets within every creature that walks, swims, or flies. Falkowski shows how evolution works to maintain this core machinery of life, and how we and other animals are veritable conglomerations of microbes.
Maybe it was a viral pandemic or an asteroid strike or perhaps nuclear war. Whatever the cause, the world as we know it has ended, and you and the other survivors must start again. What key knowledge would you need to start rebuilding civilisation from scratch? Once you’ve scavenged what you can, how do you begin producing the essentials? How do you grow food, generate power, prepare medicines, or get metal out of rocks? Could you avert another Dark Ages or take shortcuts to accelerate redevelopment?
Like Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, which provided a new perspective on how evolution works, Life on the Edge alters our understanding of life's dynamics. Bringing together firsthand experience of science at the cutting edge with unparalleled gifts of exposition and explanation, Jim Al-Khalili and Johnjoe Macfadden reveal the hitherto missing ingredient to be quantum mechanics and the strange phenomena that lie at the heart of this most mysterious of sciences.
Drawing on recent groundbreaking experiments around the world, they show how photosynthesis relies on subatomic particles existing in many places at once while inside enzymes, those workhorses of life that make every molecule within our cells, particles vanish from one point in space and instantly materialize in another.
Each chapter in Life on the Edge opens with an engaging example that illustrates one of life’s puzzles - How do migrating birds know where to go? How do we really smell the scent of a rose? How do our genes manage to copy themselves with such precision? - and then reveals how quantum mechanics delivers its answer.
Guiding the reader through the maze of rapidly unfolding discovery, Al-Khalili and McFadden communicate vividly the excitement of this explosive new field of quantum biology, with its potentially revolutionary applications, and offer insights into the biggest puzzle of all: what is life? As they brilliantly demonstrate here, life lives on the quantum edge.
this book simply explains the quantum nature of life in the context of biological sciences and quantum mechanics. very well written and emotionally compelling.
I stumbled upon this book, rather accidentally. It has been a truly remarkable learning experience to understand quauntum principles as fundamental to organic life! A peep into cutting edge research thinking. As a lay reader, interested in Science and pondering about life, it was filled with amazement of so many new ideas and insights. Some parts are challenging to comprehend without the in-depth exposure to quantum science, which I lacked. Overall, if one is interested in the question of what this Life is all about and if one has been exploring spirituality, this book is a highly recommended read (listen)!
revolutionizing ideas in the junction of many disciplines. very well written for a complex science book.
What made the experience of listening to Life on the Edge the most enjoyable?
As this is a review of an audio book, the prize has to go to the narrator, Pete Cross. His is one of the most pleasant reading voices I have yet listened to - and important for a scientific work. He engages the listener with his smooth reading style, very good voice tone and timbre and has taken the trouble to pronounce scientific words clearly. His diction and pronunciation cannot be faulted and he makes the contents compelling and interesting. In addition, the book itself is an extraordinary read and I have subsequently purchased the paperback as well for annotation purposes.
This is a compelling story of how quantum physics has expanded into the field of biology. The authors have delineated the process of how it all happened by quoting studies and experiments and have made the concepts very clear for a science-loving non-scientist. Famous physicists such as Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger and Richard Feynman ('What I cannot create, I do not understand') are given their place in history while modern experimental findings tell of mankind's further adventures into this minuscule world. Thermodynamics, tunnelling and entanglement are explained with clear examples, along with the mysterious way in which measurement affects behaviour in the quantum world, not a new concept, but puts it into context. We have so much to learn.
A very interesting book but sometimes a little hard to follow, but that is the nature of the subject.
I really wish it had been narrated by Jim and surprised it was not considering his Radio 4 and BBC TV work. I would preferred to hear his calm, traditional English voice than to the colonial one, which often mangled British names and places.
Would you listen to Life on the Edge again? Why?
Yes, its needed there are some great ideas that need re listening (in my case) to fully take in the absolute content of the book.
Which character – as performed by Pete Cross – was your favourite?
A truly eye opening book, with extremely convincing arguments to link how the very unlikely and paradoxical world of quantum dynamics may be the only reason that any life, as we know it, can exist.
The nuances of the effects of QD are eye opening in the extreme. The apparent workings of QD in the "warm and wet" environment of all living cells are so unlikely and of potentially world-changing in its possibilities in areas well outside living things, for instance, being able to use the effect to increase the energy extraction from the sun by using the same effect that photosynthesis does (which is almost 100% efficient!), would utterly change the possible options for our world energy requirements.
This is notwithstanding the question of how life came into existence in the first place, which is still a very live and puzzling thing.
The reader did his job well, although being English, there were naturally certain word pronunciations that grated - so not his fault!
I'd recommend this book to any enquiring mind. It will inspire you to view the world in a very different way. It's as though one has climbed a hill in what at first appeared an unpromising area and suddenly found oneself overlooking a stunning panorama with endless possibilities!
worth read again and again!
finally philosophy, quantum biology, physics and mechanic together! very good put together, worth reading again!
This was recommended by a physicist friend. It's highly readable despite providing a full revision of modern physics before explaining new learning about the role quantum mechanics plays in the biology of life. I thought I had a reasonable grasp of biology but this stuff is dynamite!