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The definition of life has long been a challenge for scientists and philosophers. [2] [3] [4] This is partially because life is a process, not a substance. [5] [6] [7] This is complicated by a lack of knowledge of the characteristics of living entities, if any, that may have developed outside Earth.
The first English use of the expression "meaning of life" appears in Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1833–1834), book II chapter IX, "The Everlasting Yea". [1]Our Life is compassed round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life itself no other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force: thus have we a warfare; in the beginning, especially, a hard-fought battle.
What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell is a 1944 science book written for the lay reader by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger.The book was based on a course of public lectures delivered by Schrödinger in February 1943, under the auspices of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, where he was Director of Theoretical Physics, at Trinity College, Dublin.
Sphera volgare, featuring the Sun, the Moon, the winds and the stars as living. Woodcut illustration from an edition of De sphaera mundi, Venice, 1537.. Hylozoism is the philosophical doctrine according to which all matter is alive or animated, [clarification needed] [1] either in itself or as participating in the action of a superior principle, usually the world-soul (anima mundi). [2]
Called "imaginative and tongue-in-cheek", the idea gave rise to science fiction depictions. [108] Carl Sagan , another optimist with regards to extraterrestrial life, considered the possibility of organisms that are always airborne within the high atmosphere of Jupiter in a 1976 paper.
An ellipse (red) obtained as the intersection of a cone with an inclined plane. Ellipse: notations Ellipses: examples with increasing eccentricity. In mathematics, an ellipse is a plane curve surrounding two focal points, such that for all points on the curve, the sum of the two distances to the focal points is a constant.
General metaphysics, also called ontology, [c] takes the widest perspective and studies the most fundamental aspects of being. It investigates the features that all entities share and how entities can be divided into different categories. Categories are the most general kinds, such as substance, property, relation, and fact. [17]
Life arose from the Earth's first ocean, which formed some 3.8 billion years ago. [33] Since then, water continues to be the most abundant molecule in every organism. Water is important to life because it is an effective solvent, capable of dissolving solutes such as sodium and chloride ions or other small molecules to form an aqueous solution.