Sara Walker

Astrobiologist, Theoretical Physicist, Professor

---

Sara Walker is an astrobiologist, theoretical physicist and professor at Arizona State University.   Much of her work has been focused on developing new approaches to understanding what life is at a fundamental level, detecting alien life, and designing synthetic life.   Her work with Professor and Chemist Lee Cronin on Assembly Theory is one of the most exciting branches of science, tacking some fundamental questions about life, entropy, order, cosmology and consciousness.  

Quotes by Sara Walker

"Life is information propagating through matter." - Sara Walker

"If you want to live forever, maximize your causal output." - Sara Walker

"Consciousness and matter are part of the same causal structure, the key difference being whether we are looking deep in time or looking at what exists only now." - Sara Walker

"Imagination illuminates the classes of things that can exist only because a conscious agent dreamed of them." - Sara Walker

"There are principles and laws that govern our universe that we don't understand yet, that have something to do with how information interacts with the physical world." - Sara Walker

"Explanations [and theories] become causal to our future." - Sara Walker

"A universe without causation is devoid of life" - Sara Walker

"The physics we know and love, as taught in modern physics departments, provides a fundamental description of a dead universe. It’s not the universe I live in, and I bet you don’t either." - Sara Walker

"If you trace back in time far enough, every living thing on this planet shares a single memory." - Sara Walker

"I am not my atoms. You are not your molecules. We are part of the current moment of a billions-year-old lineage of propagating information that has structured matter on our Earth since the origin of life." - Sara Walker

"Everything interesting on this planet requires a memory of the past to exist in the present." - Sara Walker

"Each digital object you create becomes a fixture on the walls of someone else’s reality" - Sara Walker

"Virtual realities are built by putting larger volumes of time in smaller volumes of space, this does not mean they are unphysical, just that they are more physical in time than space." - Sara Walker

"Technology is a solidification of the memory of our past, human ingenuity remains the propellant of our future - as has been the case for millennia. We should not enable the current AI elixir to fool us about what the future looks like, we are far from understanding it." - Sara Walker

"Life is how the universe learns" - Sara Walker

"Life emerges in chemistry because molecules are the simplest things the universe can assemble where the possibility space is illimitable." - Sara Walker

"Assembly defines where things exist in time in the same manner that spatial coordinates define where things exist in space #assemblytheory" - Sara Walker

"Ultimately, time is intrinsic to our experiences of the world, and it is necessary for evolution to happen. If we want physics to be capable of explaining life – and us - it may be that we need to treat time as a material property for the first time in physics." - Sara Walker

"Miracles are distinguished from physics by whether something occurs just once, or can be caused to occur repeatedly" - Sara Walker