Marina Cortês: Biocosmology: towards the birth of a new physics field

Abstract: For over 200 years, the reductionist assumption has been the leading methodology in scientific practice in physical sciences. Today, our physics community has struggled with the quantum gravity puzzle for nearly 100 years. I argue that insights on the solution to this puzzle might come from the least direction we expect them to. It just might be that living systems have a lesson to teach theoretical physicists. We started to make inroads into this possibility with the biocosmology proposal in three technical articles (arXiv pre-prints found at biocosmology.earth). The non-ergodicity observed in the evolution of living system calls for novel methodologies for evaluating their multiplicity in phase space. We developed the TAP equation (Theory of the Adjacent Possible) which uses combinatorial innovation to count the number of microstates in the biosphere.