Origin of life theories

So I finally got around to reading Frankenstein, and I'm a ways into it, and it's gotten me interested in the origin of life. Apparently no one has any firm idea how life 'happened', as it were.

I'm reading the abiogenesis article on Wikipedia (in before "Wikipedia can be changed by anyone, it's totally false!", it's reliable enough for me.), and the only guy that had any clue what was going on was Alexander Oparin.

Now, I'm no scientist, but it seems completely mind-boggling to me that simple molecules could spontaneously become autonomous due to the chemical properties of their constituent atoms.

Any intelligent anons care to spread the intelligence, or can recommend any reading other than Wikipedia to try to comprehend this concept?

I can tell you than when the moon was being studied by japanese scientists regarding meteorite and asteroid impacts; attempting to find out the approximate sizes of the asteroids by impact crater size and depth they simulated an impact using compacted elements that are most commonly present inside of asteroids, some of the basic elements in any living creature including water, carbon, etc. When the compacted elements were shot down a tube about 2000 miles an hour and impacted the metal plate at the other end, a miraculous finding was made by these Japanese scientists.

The elements including water had changed from their basic elemental forms into amino acids.

Just to let you know.

:/