How Theoretical Physicists Can Help Find E.T.

[Ninshub]

How Theoretical Physicists Can Help Find E.T.

By Hanneke Weitering, Space.com Staff Writer | June 28, 2018

"When I think about looking for life, I'm not really thinking about looking for cells on a planet or molecules in an atmosphere. I think about looking for an entirely new sector of physics," Sara Walker, an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, said during a panel discussion at the World Science Festival in New York City. During the panel, she and a group of extraterrestrial experts pondered the possibilities of life beyond Earth and the very nature of life itself.

According to Walker, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) — which primarily involves astronomers, biologists and chemists — could benefit from the insight of theoretical physicists in explaining the most fundamental properties of life and how it originates. "I think that biology has a hard time explaining the origin of life, because it's the origin of biology," Walker told Space.com. "It's very difficult to explain the origin of [biology] if you don't have some kind of fundamental theory."


Characterizing life using physics instead of biology or chemistry "seems like an unusual way of thinking about it," she said, "but we have some really amazing mathematical theories of the world — we have quantum mechanics and general relativity and these amazing revolutions in our understanding of the natural world — and we don't have any theories that explain the existence of life or the properties of life."  But theoretical physicists could develop those, she added.

https://www.space.com/41024-search-for-i...ysics.html