English

Softening the "crystal-scaffold" for life's emergence

Soft Condensed Matter 2012-02-29 v2 Quantum Physics

Abstract

Del Giudice's group study how water can organize on hydrophilic surfaces forming coherent domains (loaning energy from the quantum vacuum), plus quasi-free electrons, whose excitations produce cold vortices, aligning to ambient fields. Their electric and magnetic dipolar modes can couple to oscillatory (electric-organic-dipoles), and/or rotary (magnetic-mineral-dipoles), besides responding to magnetic potentials. Thus, imprinted electromagnetic patterns of catalytic colloids - c.f. Cairns-Smith's "crystal-scaffold"- on their structured water partners could have equipped the latter with a selection-basis for 'choosing' their context-based "soft-matter" (de Gennes) replacements. We consider the potential of the scenario of an external control on magnetic colloids forming in the Hadean hydrothermal setting (of Russell and coworkers) - via a magnetic-rock-field - conceptually enabling self-assembly, induction of asymmetries, response effects towards close-to-equilibrium dynamics, associative-networks, besides providing a coherent environment for stabilizing associated symmetry-broken quanta, and their feedback-interactions with those of coherent water-domains, to address the emergence of metabolism and replication.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1108.0309,
  title  = {Softening the "crystal-scaffold" for life's emergence},
  author = {Gargi Mitra-Delmotte and Asoke Nath Mitra},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1108.0309},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

26 pages, pdf file. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1008.2362