Mikhail Tikhonov from Washington University in St. Louis presented this Saturday Science Lecture.

In the early twentieth century, a sequence of discoveries in physics, most notably relativity theory and quantum mechanics, transformed how we view the world. What are the chances of this happening again? Building a quantum computer or discovering room-temperature superconductivity would certainly have revolutionary technological applications – but are there any areas of basic science where the methods of theoretical physics might help bring an equally profound change? This question is, of course, impossible to answer with any certainty, but fun to speculate about. Tikhonov presented a case that the next revolution in physics might be about the living world, and could transform the very language we use to describe it, including the basic notions such as “species” or “organism.”

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