The Demon in the Machine: Does New Physics Lurk Inside Living Matter?

When Darwin explained evolution, he made no attempt to answer the deeper question of what gives life its distinctive and dazzling properties. That challenge was taken up by the physicist Erwin Schr\"{o}dinger in a famous 1944 book \textit{What Is Life?} Decades later, the nature of living matter remains an enigma. But recently, deep links between information theory and biological organisms offer an important clue -- the origins of which can be traced back 153 years to `Maxwell's demon,' a thought experiment linking information and matter.~