The Logic of Life in the Ninth Power of Ten

At the end of 2023, Shunong Bai, Emeritus Professor of Plant Biology of School of Life Science at Peking University, has published two popular science works: Life in the Ninth Power of Ten and The Logic of Life.

These two books explore profound questions about life, starting from the origin of living systems, sorting out and reconstructing living phenomena at different levels, and then put forward the idea that "life is a special form of material existence that follows the principle of 'structure for energy'". Based on experience across different subjects, Professor Shunong Bai extend the time scale from the traditional thousands of years to billions of years, providing us with a completely new perspective on life and human evolution. Therefore, the launch of these two books will bring us an innovative understanding of the nature of life and in-depth thinking about human evolution.

Speaker

Shunong Bai
Emeritus Professor of School of Life Science, Peking University, 2020-2021 Berggruen Fellow.
Mainly focusing on plant biology, he has explored various plant developmental events to different degrees. Following the concept of "plant development unit" proposed in 1993, he also concluded the concept of "sexual reproductive cycle" in 2011, and then "plant development program" in 2013. Despite of working on plant developmental biology, he also thinks for a long time on the nature of life, the nature of education and the training goals of undergraduate life science education.

Commentators

Chang Liu
Associate Professor, School of Philosophy, Renmin University of China
Areas of Specialization: Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Action, Philosophy of Mind.

Tao Pan
Science and culture scholar

Moderator

Siyu Wang
Editor, Peking University Press
Executive editor of The Logic of Life, mainly engaged in editing and publishing college textbooks and academic books.