Creation and Destruction in Life, the Economy, and the Universe. During the 2008 global financial crisis, MIT quantum physicist Seth Lloyd was struck by a strange pattern. Viewed from a mathematical perspective, the failure of the world economy looked a lot like the gravitational collapse of a star into a black hole. It also looked like the formation of a cancerous tumour in an otherwise healthy body, and like to catastrophic destruction of ecosystems. On the other hand, it also looked like a certain theory of how life got started in the first place. Here was the logic of collapse, of creation and destruction, reduced to its mathematical signature.