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biology, the more important its physical aspects become – because life isn’t a special
kind
of matter, so it too must obey the rules of physics. What looked like a vast, unbridgeable gulf between the life sciences and the physical sciences is shrinking so fast that it’s turning out to be little more than a thin line scratched in the sand of the scientific desert.
    If we are to step across that line, though, we need to revise the way we think. It’s all too easy to fall back on old – and inappropriate – habits. To illustrate the point, and to set up a running theme for this book, let’s see what the engineering problems of getting to the Moon tell us about how living creatures work.
    The main obstacle to getting a human being on to the Moon is not distance, but gravity. You could
walk
to the Moon in about thirty years – given a path, air, and the usual appurtenances of the experienced traveller – were it not for the fact that it’s uphill most of the way. It takes energy to lift a person from the surface of the planet to the neutral point where the Moon’s pull cancels out the Earth’s. Physics provides a definite lower limit for the energy you must expend – it’s the difference between the ‘potential energy’ of a mass placed at the neutral point and the potential energy of the same mass placed on the ground. The Law of Conservation of Energy says that you can’t do the job with less energy, however clever you are.
    You can’t beat physics.
    This is what makes space exploration so expensive. It takes a lot of fuel to lift one person into space by rocket, and to make matters worse, you need more fuel to lift the
rocket
… and more fuel to lift the fuel … and … At any rate, it seems that we’re stuck at the bottom of the Earth’s gravity well, and the ticket out
has
to cost a fortune.
    Are we, though?
    At various times, similar calculations have been applied to living creatures, with bizarre results. It has been ‘proved’ that kangaroos can’t jump, bees can’t fly, and birds can’t get enough energy from their food to power their search for the food in the first place. It has even been ‘proved’ that life is impossible because living systems become more and more ordered, whereas physics implies that all systems become more and more disordered. The main message that biologists have derived from these exercises has been a deep scepticism about the relevance of physics to biology, and a comfortable feeling of superiority, because life is clearly much more interesting than physics.
    The correct message is very different: be careful what tacit assumptions you make when you do that kind of calculation. Take that kangaroo, for instance. You can work out how much energy a kangaroo uses when it makes a jump, count how many jumps it makes in a day, and deduce a lower limit on its daily energy requirements. During a jump, the kangaroo leaves the ground, rises, and drops back down again, so the calculation is just like that for a space rocket. Do the sums, and you find that the kangaroo’s daily energy requirement is about ten times as big as anything it can get from its food. Conclusion: kangaroos can’t jump. Since they can’t jump, they can’t find food, so they’re all dead.
    Strangely, Australia is positively teeming with kangaroos, who fortunately cannot do physics.
    What’s the mistake? The calculation models a kangaroo as if it were a sack of potatoes. Instead of a thousand kangaroo leaps per day (say), it works out the energy required to lift a sack of potatoes off the ground and drop it back down, 1000 times. But if you look at a slow-motion film of a kangaroo bounding across the Australian outback, it doesn’t look like a sack of potatoes. A kangaroo
bounces
, lolloping along like a huge rubber spring. As its legs go up, its head and tail go down, storing energy in its muscles. Then, as the feet hit the ground, that energy is released to trigger the next leap. Because most of the