I woke up this morning, the first day of my winter holiday, thinking, while still in that quasi-dream-wake state, about the origins of life. I listen to a lot of biology books as I go to sleep, so maybe it isn’t so strange to wake up to such thoughts.

I was mainly thinking about a microscopic “concentration chamber”, where low entropy molecules flow in, chemical processes take place, and then high entropy molecules flow out. These chemical processes are the processes of “living”, but this wasn’t in a form most people think of when thinking of “life”.

I wrote these thoughts down in my online notebook. This also gave me a chance to get some practice using the iPad Pro, Pages, and Apple Pencil for wring down ideas.

If you want to see my thoughts on the origins of life, Click here are my full notes - a dream thought expanded to 4 PDF pages. If I get anything right, I credit Nick Lane (I love his books).

Here is the first hand-drawn sketch in the notes and the image in my mind as I woke up: