Everything that is alive is made of a large collection of particles that exchanges energy and matter with its surroundings in an environment at some ambient temperature. This means that if we can come up with some statements about such physical systems that hold in general, then we will have immediately learned some potentially interesting things about the physical properties of any given organism. The trick, of course, will be to see whether we can say anything non-trivial (“all living things have a gravitational field.” So what?), which would presumably happen if we could understand something deep about the physics behind how living things grow, reproduce, sense, compute, signal, adapt, and evolve. This is a new field, and some of those goals still seem a long way off, but recent progress in our modeling of nonequilibrium phenomena have offered up some tantalizing glimpses of what may be in store.