Life is not defined by being a solid object or a stable state, but by its ability to move between different levels of organization.
April 29, 2026
Original Paper
Life as a Regime of Multiscale Accessibility
SSRN · 6486379
The Takeaway
Most biologists define life through characteristics like metabolism or reproduction, but this new theory uses the lens of multiscale accessibility. It proposes that living things are unique because they maintain a constant flow between the tiny molecular level and the large scale organism level. This irreducibility prevents the system from becoming too rigid or too chaotic, allowing it to survive in a changing world. If this mathematical framework holds, it changes how we search for life on other planets by looking for specific patterns of transition instead of just chemical signatures. It moves our definition of life away from biology and toward a fundamental law of physics. This could redefine our place in the universe.
From the abstract
Recent work in tissue biophysics, organoid morphogenesis, and nonequilibrium thermodynamics has made it increasingly difficult to describe life either as a stable form or as a merely self-organizing state of matter. Living systems appear instead as materially active configurations that sustain differences across scales: local order does not collapse into global coherence, and global coherence does not erase local singularity. This paper proposes a first conceptual reconstruction of that situatio