As some of you may know, I spent last week at CERN, the European high-energy physics laboratory where the famous Higgs boson was discovered last July. Every time I go to CERN I feel a deep sense of reverence. Apart from quick visits over the years, I was there for three months in the late 1990s as a visiting scientist, doing work on early Universe physics, trying to figure out how to connect the Universe we see today with what may have happened in its infancy.
CERN was already famous at that time for many discoveries, including the trio of particles that confirmed that two of the four forces of Nature, the electromagnetic and the weak nuclear force, can be interpreted as a single force at high energies. Their names are not so sexy, W+, W-, and Z0 (the superscripts represent their electric charge in units of an electron charge), but these three bosons represent a triumph of human creativity, a beautiful example of how theory and experiment work together: they were predicted in the late 1960s to exist by a theory unifying the two forces and were subsequently discovered in 1983 at CERN's Super Proton Synchrotron, by then turned into a proton-antiproton collider.
Going to CERN is like stepping onto hallowed ground, a portal into a realm foreign to our everyday perception, where the invisible world of high-energy particles is made accessible to us, even if only through indirect data analysis.
It's all the more interesting, then, that the purpose of my visit was not particle physics but the origin of life.
A small group of scientists from different fields got together to discuss and review what is known about the origin of life and where the field is going. One of the organizers was none other than our own Stuart Kauffman, whom I expect will give his own version of the proceedings. There were physicists, evolutionary biologists, biochemists, Earth scientists, all areas of science that touch in one way or another the very complex scientific question of how inanimate matter became animated on our planet some 3.5 billion years ago — or earlier.
There are many parts to the question of the origin of life, starting with an understanding of what life is. Surprisingly, there isn't a universally agreed definition of life; different scientists think about life differently and consensus is not forthcoming. Some, like Carol Cleland, from the University of Colorado, and Christopher Chyba, from Princeton University, even argue that it may be best not to try to define life, as any definition would necessarily constrain our imagination; there may be some seemingly bizarre systems out there that may be living, even if in ways very distant from what we see around us.