Two Queen Mary papers ask: where do cosmic order and bacterial cooperation come from?
A London mathematician recasts the second law as a driver of cosmic structure, while biologists show photosynthetic bacteria defend themselves in coordinated herds. Same institution, same week, same instinct to look for rules under the surface.
On 17 July 2026, a mathematician at Queen Mary University of London published a paper arguing that the second law of thermodynamics, the rule that disorder tends to increase, is not just a description of decay. It is a generative engine. The author, Professor Ginestra Bianconi, proposes a new framework called Gravity from Entropy, in which the structure of the universe, the web of galaxies and the filaments between them, emerges because entropy has to keep rising. Galaxies form where they do, on this reading, because concentrating matter in some regions lets the rest of the cosmos radiate more disorder elsewhere.
Two days earlier, on 15 July, a different Queen Mary team reported something simpler and stranger. Tiny photosynthetic bacteria, when attacked by predators, do not scatter. They bunch into coordinated herds, the way wildebeest do on the savannah, and the herd structure protects the cells at the centre while leaving the outer ring exposed. The behaviour, captured in laboratory films, is not flocking in the bird sense. It is a defensive architecture, and it has measurable consequences for the carbon those organisms fix.
Read together, the two papers sketch an unsettling picture. Order in nature, from galaxy clusters to bacterial colonies, is not the exception that contradicts entropy. It is what entropy does, given the right geometry. Whether that is a deep statement about the cosmos or a useful metaphor for life on Earth is the open question.
Gravity as an accounting trick
Bianconi's argument, summarised in the Phys.org coverage of the new study, treats gravity as an emergent phenomenon rather than a fundamental force. In the standard account, gravity is built into the fabric of spacetime and curves it around mass. In the new account, what we call gravity is the statistical tendency of matter to cluster in ways that maximise the entropy of the wider system, even when local patches of structure look highly ordered.
The framework borrows the language of information theory. Each configuration of matter carries an entropy, and the universe spends most of its history moving between configurations with higher and higher entropy. Galaxies, galaxy clusters and the cosmic web are not free lunches. They are the cheapest available way for a gravitating system to keep increasing its disorder, and gravity is the name we give to the gradient that pulls matter down that path.
The pitch is not that Einstein was wrong. Einstein's equations still describe what gravity does at human scales. The claim is that those equations may be a limit case of something more general, one in which the arrow of time is doing the heavy lifting and the curvature of space is downstream of it. If the framework survives scrutiny, it would reframe one of cosmology's oldest puzzles: why a universe born in a hot, uniform state ended up threaded with structure instead of staying smooth.
A herd is a unit
The biological paper, also published through Queen Mary University of London, sits closer to the ground. The organisms in question are cyanobacteria, photosynthetic microbes that sit at the base of marine and freshwater food webs and account for a significant share of the carbon fixed into the living ocean. Predators, including other microbes, push back. The response, the researchers found, is collective.
When predator pressure rose in the lab, the bacteria reorganised into dense, ring-shaped herds. Cells on the outside of the ring suffered higher mortality. Cells on the inside survived disproportionately. The herd, in other words, behaved as a single defensive object. Individuals inside it were buffered; individuals on the rim were spent.
The result matters for the carbon cycle, not just for bacterial etiquette. If predators preferentially eat cells on the outside of a herd, the carbon those cells contain is more likely to be respired back to the atmosphere by the predator or by decomposition, rather than locked into long-lived biomass or exported to the deep ocean. That is a small, lab-scale finding with a large implication: the geometry of microbial cooperation can tilt the planet's carbon accounting.
Two pictures of the same instinct
The temptation is to read these papers as a coincidence of scheduling, a London physics department that also happens to do good microbiology. The deeper pattern is more interesting. Both teams are asking a version of the same question: under what rules does order appear in a system that, left to itself, should run downhill?
In Bianconi's cosmology, the answer is that running downhill is exactly what produces the order, because the downhill slope is set by entropy. In the bacterial work, the answer is that running downhill is delayed, locally, by cells paying a price in their outer members to keep the colony alive. The galaxy cluster and the bacterial herd sit at opposite ends of the size spectrum, but both are structures that exist because the surrounding disorder keeps increasing.
That is not a theorem. It is a way of looking, and it is increasingly the way a generation of researchers trained in statistical physics and complex systems do look. The same mathematical toolkit, network theory, agent-based modelling, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, shows up in papers on dark matter and in papers on phytoplankton.
What the sources do not yet show
Neither paper closes its own argument. The Gravity from Entropy framework is a proposal, not a confirmed replacement for general relativity, and Bianconi's published work will need to be tested against the standard cosmological observables: the cosmic microwave background, the distribution of galaxies at different redshifts, the lensing patterns around massive clusters. The bacterial herd result is a controlled laboratory finding. Whether cyanobacteria in the open ocean form comparable rings under real predation pressure, and whether those rings survive the turbulence of surface waters, is an empirical question the sources do not answer.
What can be said with the material at hand is narrower and more useful. Two research teams at the same London university, working on problems separated by roughly twenty orders of magnitude in length scale, have both produced results in the same fortnight that treat structure as something the universe pays for, rather than something it stumbles into. The next round of evidence will decide whether the resemblance is real or only rhetorical.
Desk note: Monexus framed this as a paired story about how order emerges under entropic pressure, rather than as two unrelated science items, because the source material released in the same week from the same institution invited the comparison. The Cosmology paper is treated as a proposal, not a discovery.