I’m reading a book by the moment called ‘The Unifnished Universe’ by Louise Young, a science writer and former physicist. The book offers a theory of order, growth, change, and life in the universe. She tackles the theory of entropy – that the universe is running down and becoming disordered: she argues that there are ‘opposing’ forces that create more complex, highly organized, and efficient forms of matter at the same time – one of these forces is life. In a very elegant way, she argues that life is about preservation of form over time. For organisms this takes place through that most primary form of writing, DNA. We reproduce and evolve over generations, and the forms of life seem to grow ever more complex. Does this mean that life is a form of memory in a chaotic universe? I am interested in memory, particularly how human beings preserve knowledge and culture in material artefacts (for example, books and Boeing 747s).

The author is obviously a Christian, and although most of the book just explains the science, she does imply in parts that this creative force needs a reason, and this reason must be God. I have always seen this last step as unnecessary: there is incredibly beauty and creativity in the universe as it is, without positing a supernatural agent. As Darwin put it at the end of Origin of Species, ‘There is grandeur in this view of life…whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved’. Anyway, this book is beautiful and for the most part explains some very difficult contemporary science and physics with clarity and lucidity.