The laws of physics work perfectly if you play time backwards, but this flies in the face of our everyday experience. Your headphones come out of your pockets tangled, but never perfectly rolled up; a drop of dye spreads in water, but never re​-​concentrates itself. In this course, we will explore why this happens, showing that it arises purely from statistics and probabilities rather than some fundamental force. Eventually, we will discover a specific quantity called "entropy", arguably the most important number in your life.

In his 1944 book "What is Life?", the physicist Erwin Schrodinger tackled the most fundamental question in all of biology. Today, in 2017, we still don't have a satisfying answer. Join us in a conversation that spans biology, physics, and philosophy to find out why answer this three word question is so hard.