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I’m sitting here trying to write, but really it’s just not going to happen, so I’ve admitted defeat. When I’ve finished typing this I’m going to bed. I think I must have turned soft over Christmas. This first day back at work has wiped me out.

I read the first couple of pages of A Short History of Nearly Everything when I got home, because it’s next month’s Book Club book on Radio 4. I have high hopes on the basis of the first few paragraphs alone:

Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly - in you.

That’s a pretty big set of coincidences and accidents, but in those first three pages, it’s already got me wondering about far deeper things: when does life begin, and when does it end?

It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive, but all of which had once been you.

So if we are all just a bundle of dead atoms that are somehow ‘alive’, how many atoms would you need to unpick to die? Obviously chopping off your head would do it pretty quickly, but what about if you just plucked random atoms from all over (and someone else did it for you when you got to the point where you had no hands left)? Just how many atoms would you need to remove before life disappeared.

Which leads on to another question: what is life?

As I say, all this work stuff had left me feeling rather tired.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 4th, 2005 at 11:09 pm and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.