What Is Life? by David Warren

By David Warren, The Catholic Thing, Aug. 9, 2024

David Warren is a former editor of the Idler magazine and columnist in Canadian newspapers. He has extensive experience in the Near and Far East. His blog, Essays in Idleness, is now to be found at: davidwarrenonline.com.

The students of galactic structure in our early universe are, shall we say, surprised. That the galaxies are there, at all, is part of their charm. It now also seems that they appeared much earlier than expected in our cosmic models.

But it is worse than that. The objects, we’ve now learned, are bigger and brighter than anyone expected, and many of the galaxies show an unintelligible maturity. Disc galaxies that resemble our Milky Way, more than ten billion years later, were waiting to tease us.

The problem for those with pinched brows is not that the “standard model” of the universe might be wrong. The problem is that it is not chaotic; that nothing seems to be. …