In this week’s newsletter

✅ Introduction to our episode 21 with Dr. Peter Fedichev. ✅ Could aging be fundamentally irreversible due to entropy? ✅ Detailed show notes. ✅ Why naked mole rats may have evolved negligible senescence. ✅ It’s not easy to unboil an egg.

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The message might be provocative - but you need to engage with it

Look, even I am provoked by our choice of title for our latest episode of the LEVITY podcast - and I wrote it!

But while I hope and suspect that physicist Peter Fedichev’s view on aging may not hold up in the long run, there’s no denying that he’s a brilliant thinker.

And that’s exactly why Patrick and I wanted to share his perspective. It offers a radically different lens on aging - one grounded not in biology, but in physics and statistical mechanics.

Fedichev, the founder of Gero - a ”physics-enabled” biotech company, argues that aging has an irreversible, entropic component - something akin to trying to unboil an egg. In his view, this makes reversing aging fundamentally difficult, perhaps even impossible.

Now, I’m no physicist - but I do find myself more aligned with Aubrey de Grey’s more optimistic take, which we explored in a previous episode. De Grey addressed similar concerns about epigenetic noise (which Fedichev might interpret as entropic damage), but he emphasized that we don’t need perfect repair - just enough to maintain function.

According to De Grey, even with some residual noise, interventions like partial reprogramming can still be effective. That’s where my hope lies: that Fedichev’s thermodynamic constraints, while theoretically compelling, may not be as limiting in practice as they seem.

That said, Fedichev’s ideas* are deeply thought-provoking and absolutely worth engaging with. Applying physics to the problem of aging opens up an entirely new frontier - one that challenges assumptions and could help push the field forward.

Because if we’re going to solve aging, we need all the perspectives we can get.

* By the way, if you’ve got a sharp memory, you might remember that I’ve actually covered some of Peter Fedichev’s ideas in an earlier post. You can find it here.

💡 What you'll learn in this episode:

✅ The distinction between linear/irreversible aging processes and dynamic/reversible ones.

✅ How ”effective temperature” might control physiological resilience and could be a target for intervention.

✅ Why naked mole rats may have evolved negligible senescence by tuning their effective temperature.

✅ How physics principles like entropy generation apply to complex biological systems.

✅ Why Fedichev believes focusing on slowing aging is more practical than trying to reverse it.

✅ The limitations of the hallmarks of aging framework according to Fedichev.

You can watch the episode below or listen to it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or other places, like PocketCasts. Please follow, like and subscribe! 🙏🏼 This will boost our chances of reaching a bigger audience.

A detailed overview of the episode

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