How did something come from nothing? Chemist Lee Cronin explains.

According to current physics, the universe began with a Big Bang, leading to an expanding universe where matter, hydrogen, stars, and galaxies formed. From exploding stars came planets, and eventually, life emerged, leading to human beings and technology as we know it today.

Quantum physics reveals the universe as a field of probabilities, full of entirely random sequences. When these sequences produce objects that can copy themselves and survive in their environment, evolution takes place. This quantum randomness provides the fuel for these processes, making the universe appear deterministic over time.

Cronin uses a flipping coin as an example. If a system were truly random, it would yield an equivalent number of heads and tails on a flipped coin. If the coin were weighted, however, and showed mostly heads upon flipping, the system would be considered deterministic.

Cronin’s perspective might just be imperative to understanding how the universe has evolved, through processes of selection and replication, and eventually brought us to this place in space and time.

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About Lee Cronin:

Leroy Cronin has one of the largest multidisciplinary, chemistry-based research teams in the world. He has given over 300 international talks and has authored over 350 peer-reviewed papers with recent work published in Nature, Science, and PNAS. He and his team are trying to make artificial life forms, find alien life, explore the digitization of chemistry, understand how information can be encoded into chemicals, and construct chemical computers.

He went to the University of York where he completed both a degree and PhD in chemistry and then went on to do postdocs in Edinburgh and Germany before becoming a lecturer at the Universities of Birmingham, and then Glasgow where he has been since 2002, working up the ranks to become the Regius Professor of Chemistry in 2013 at age 39.

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About The Well

Do we inhabit a multiverse? Do we have free will? What is love? Is evolution directional? There are no simple answers to life’s biggest questions, and that’s why they’re the questions occupying the world’s brightest minds.

Together, let's learn from them.

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