Of all the questions in science, few are more profound than “What is life?” What separates the living from the nonliving, and how does order persist in a universe tending toward disorder? This lens follows the intellectual journey to answer that question, beginning with Schrödinger’s vision of life as a defiance of entropy, through the rise of thermodynamic and systems-based theories that view life as self-organizing matter. From the aperiodic crystal that foretold DNA to modern ideas of dissipation and autopoiesis, these works explore how physics, chemistry, and information theory converge on the mystery of life itself.