The Study of Life and the New Physics

This is the first English translation of this revolutionary essay by Vladimir I. Vernadsky, the great Russian-Ukrainian biogeochemist. It was first published in 1930 in French in the Revue générale des sciences pures et appliquées. In it, Vernadsky makes a powerful and provocative argument for the need to develop what he calls "a new physics," something he felt was clearly necessitated by the implications of the groundbreaking work of Louis Pasteur among few others, but also something that ...