Can life transcend physics?

Oct 13, 2025

51:14

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We’re talking about life, the universe and everything – literally!

My guest is cosmologist Marina Cortês of the University of Lisbon. Marina trained as a dancer before helping to shake up cosmology with some revolutionary ideas about the nature of time. As if that wasn’t enough – she’s now using the tools of theoretical physics to investigate the significance of life in the universe, in a new field that she and her colleagues call biocosmology.

Marina’s work goes against many of the normal assumptions of physics. Put simply, you could see the conventional approach as attempting to describe everything in the universe through a set of fundamental laws and equations. And if something that we experience in the universe – like the forwards flow of time, say, or our ability to make our own choices – doesn’t fit into those equations, the mainstream view would be to say, well, that thing is an illusion. No matter how important it might seem to us, it doesn’t really exist.

Marina is doing a different kind of cosmology, that puts life, and our experience of it, first. She’s asking, how can we use the mathematical tools of cosmology and theoretical physics to describe the universe we are actually living in?

I think that’s such an exciting question, and it’s leading to some fascinating findings that could transform how we see life: from a process that simply shuffles atoms into different arrangements towards a force that continually rewrites the playing field, bursting beyond the fundamental equations and laws of physics to create completely new possibilities at every stage.

I caught up with Marina for a tour of the “biocosmos”.

Marina’s home page

https://marinacortes.org/

Introduction to biocosmology

https://marinacortes.org/cosmology-cortes-time-biocosmology-astrophysics-marina/#biocosmology

Marina launching biocosmology from Everest base camp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2HiNlqu0Lc

Short talk by Marina on biocosmology

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TH4UsyE3fo&t=3s

2023 paper on biocosmology by Marina, Stuart Kauffman, Andrew Liddle & Lee Smolin

https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.09378

The universe as a process of unique events: 2014 paper by Marina Cortês & Lee Smolin