10 Unexplained Glitches Scientists Have Observed in Nature

Jeremy England, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was working through entropy production rates in driven chemical systems, the kind of dry statistical mechanics that usually ends up in the supplementary materials of research reports. He was trying to decode how groups of atoms dissipate energy from an external source. The traditional framing of biology, inspired by Erwin Schrödinger, treats life as a thermodynamic "rebel"—an island of order in a universe sliding toward chaos. Life was once seen as an anomaly that should not exist. However, England’s equations did not produce an exception. They produced an expectation. In two thousand and fifteen, in the Journal of Chemical Physics, England published a framework showing that atoms, when exposed to a sustained energy source (such as sunlight) and surrounded by a heat bath, will spontaneously reorganize to dissipate that energy more efficiently.