Jeremy England, an MIT physicist, studies the idea that life exists as an emergent property of thermodynamics.

From a Nautilus profile: "Somehow, from the churning of blind gears, something like purpose emerges. The pieces, individually obeying nothing more than the basic laws of physics, collectively accrue function."

Thirty years ago, Nobel-winning Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine held a similar view. .

There's an ongoing debate about whether gravity itself is an emergent—rather than fundamental—force in the universe.

The theory, which supposes energy arranges itself so as to maximize entropy, seems to have been disproven last year by experimental data, a few years after being feted as the next big thing.