We have long been told by physics that we are nothing but a collection of atoms. Perhaps the most memorable line that comes to mind is physicist Brian Greene saying that we are nothing but a collection of particles dancing to the quantum mechanical tunes—or something to that effect.It’s a depressing account of the marvel of life, if you think about it.

The sheer complexity of life explained away by a hand-wavy statement that we are nothing but particles dancing to the fundamental laws of physics. I mean, it’s depressing, but frankly, it’s the dominant view among the scientific class.

But in this article, astrophysicist Adam Frank writes—and beautifully—that this reductionist account of physics is unsuitable for explaining the grandest question: how did life emerge?

From a physicist’s perspective, no complex system is weirder or more challenging than life. For one thing, the organization of living matter defies physicists’ usual expectations about the universe. Your body is made of matter, just like everything else. But the atoms you’re built from today won’t be the atoms you’re built from in a year. That means you and every other living thing aren’t an inert object, like a rock, but a dynamic pattern playing out over time. The real challenge for physics, however, is that the patterns that make up life are self-organized. Living systems both create and maintain themselves in a strange kind of loop that no existing machine can replicate. Think about the cell membrane, which enables a cell to stay alive by letting some chemicals in while keeping others out. The cell creates and continually maintains the membrane, but the membrane is also itself a process that makes the cell.

That chicken-and-egg problem challenges the dream of the old physics: that once the universe’s fundamental particles were cataloged, everything else could be explicitly described and predicted. Give me a young star, and I can use the reductionist laws of physics to predict that star’s future: It will live a million years rather than a billion years; it will die as a black hole rather than as a white dwarf. But the components of a living organism yield something new and unexpected, a phenomenon called “emergence.” Give me a simple cell from the early days of Earth’s history, and I could never predict that some 4 billion years later it would evolve into a giant rabbit that can punch you in the face. Kangaroos—like humans—are an unpredictable, emergent consequence of life’s evolution.