Jim Al-Khalili On The Unavoidable Law That Will Destroy The Universe

Steam engines to DNA, entropy to fractals – Jim Al-Khalili uncovers the physics that shapes life itself. From Sadi Carnot’s heat engines to Rudolf Clausius’s entropy, we trace how the second law powers everything from car pistons to cells. Then the story swerves into chaos: Lorenz’s butterfly effect and Mandelbrot’s self-similar fractals reveal how simple rules spawn astonishing patterns. But the biggest jolt comes at the quantum scale, where tunnelling protons inside DNA may tip base pairs into mutations that drive evolution – and sometimes disease. We glimpse smarticles self-organising under energy flow and step inside lab-built Chem-puters in Glasgow, where Lee Cronin and Sarah Walker probe how information might be the true substrate of life. Why does order emerge from disorder? Could physics make life not just possible but likely? And what happens when we push these ideas to the edge of the universe? Watch to see how thermodynamics, chaos theory and quantum mechanics intertwine to illuminate the origin and future of life. Watch now and decide where you would draw the line between non-life and living systems. #QuantumBiology #Thermodynamics #Entropy #MandelbrotSet #ButterflyEffect #OriginOfLife #JimAlKhalili