“You know, I can understand nine words in that book now.” – Billy Madison
Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence
Author: Sara Imari Walker
Pages: 272
Format: Hardcover
Published: August 6, 2024
Publisher: Riverhead Books
View on Goodreads
Date Completed: November 3, 2024
My rating: 
Thoughts
This was the October pick for The Planetary Society Book Club. Let me start off by saying that it is clear the Sara Imari Walker is extremely intelligent. I’m certainly not as smart as her, but I, and I write this with the utmost humility, am a pretty smart guy. Lastly, I’ve never felt more like a dum-dum than while reading this book.
From what I could understand about the concepts of assembly theory, which wasn’t much, it seems like an interesting theory about how life came to be from the standpoint of physics. In other words, how did life form from nothingness? But not in the “oh, God created man” faith sort of thing, but in the “what are the physics behind life emerging and what would that look like elsewhere?” Would we even know life if we found it? A lot of scientists searching for life on other worlds go by “we’ll know it when we see it;” but Sara posits that we may not know it when we see it without first understanding what we’re even looking for. What is life? When does something become alive? When I’m alone, am I actually dead until someone interacts with me?
And… that’s about how much I understood. I didn’t understand exactly what assembly theory is enough to be able to describe it here. I know she used a LEGO example, which kind of made it easier to understand, but also not really.
At any rate, I’m not going to sit here and debate anyone on how life came to be. If you want to leave it at God, that’s fine. If you want more than that, I’m probably in that boat too. If you’re a scientist, but you totally disagree with assembly theory, who am I to judge?
So at this point I’ll shift to the basic readability of this book. And really, there’s nothing basic about it. Sara can write – that much is clear. But I wouldn’t put her in the Carl Sagan, Bill Nye, or Neil deGrasse Tyson world of making science reachable to the lay person. Carl, Bill, and Neil have all popularized science for the general public. They made it so that dum-dums like me could get a grasp and even feel the awe of the cosmos. Unfortunately, Sara wasn’t quite as captivating in her writing.
There were too many big words that slowed down the reading. The science, when she tried to explain it, still went over my head. The LEGO example I’ve already mentioned was probably the closest I could get to even a minute understanding of what she was trying to get across, but even that was a lot to conceptualize. I assume someone with some training in physics probably got through this quite easily. But this didn’t really feel like a science popularization book to me. It just wasn’t super accessible to me.
Something that Sara did throughout the book, which I saw another Goodreads review note, was the constant name-dropping of other famous scientists, many of whom she referred to as friends, or colleagues, or fellow whatevers. I get it. She’s in a cohort of some of the most intelligent people on the planet. But it seemed a little self-aggrandizing at times. Not all of her references were that way, though. She’d refer to Albert Einstein or Erwin Schrodinger from time to time, referencing Albert’s general theory of relativity or Erwin’s work in quantum mechanics.
At this point you may be feeling a little uncomfortable that I refer to everyone so casually by their first names. Well, guess what – I was pretty uncomfortable with it too. Referring to historical figures by their first names feels too casual and kind of diminishes their gravitas. Basically, the tone of familiarity throughout this text doesn’t match the weight of the subject. Perhaps the author was trying to make the subject matter feel more casual or informal by doing this. But it was simply too jarring. It felt like she was overreaching in an attempt to make these figures feel relatable. I’m sure there was a sense of consistency that she (or her editors) wanted to keep when referring to individuals that she does know personally. But in a science book especially I expect everyone to be referred to by their last name. Even if it’s Doctor or Professor So-and-so.
A lot of people don’t rate non-fiction books because it can be taken the wrong way. By this I mean that if you give a non-fiction book five stars, what is that saying? That the book was well-written? That you agree with the subject matter? What about memoirs, autobiographies, or biographies?
My rating of non-fiction books is simply in relation to the readability and understandability of the book in question. If I don’t agree or like the subject matter, I probably just won’t finish the book. With that in mind, I’m giving this book 2.5 out of 5 stars. What Sara was able to do here was get me interested in learning more about this theory of how life emerges from non-life. It is something I wouldn’t shy away from if I encounter it elsewhere. Her examples throughout were good, but not always reachable or conceptualizable to me. I’m not making an overall judgment of the author as I could imagine picking up another one of her books. But I might go into it a little more cautiously and aware that it may be a slow burn for me.
