Related papers: Thermodynamic Function of Life
Life is characterized by a myriad of complex dynamic processes allowing organisms to grow, reproduce, and evolve. Physical approaches for describing systems out of thermodynamic equilibrium have been increasingly applied to living systems,…
Although many solar systems have been discovered, only one example of life is known. Thus, terrestrial life represents merely one data point. Consequently, extrapolating from terrestrial life to life elsewhere in the galaxy and beyond is…
The energy dissipated by a living organism is commonly identified with heat generation. However, as cells exchange metabolites with their environment they also dissipate energy in the form of chemical entropy. How dissipation is distributed…
Entropy is arguably one of the most powerful concepts to understand the world, from the behavior of molecules to the expansion of the universe, from how life emerges to how hybrid complex systems like cities come into being and continue…
Human activity has an enormous impact on Earth, changing organisms, environments and landscapes, leading to the decline of original ecosystems and irreversible changes that create new combinations of living beings and materials. As a…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
It is well known that life on Earth alters its environment over evolutionary and geological timescales. An important open question is whether this is a result of evolutionary optimization or a universal feature of life. In the latter case,…
Cosmologists wish to explain how our Universe, in all its complexity, could ever have come about. For that, we assess the number of states in our Universe now. This plays the role of entropy in thermodynamics of the Universe, and reveals…
Darwinian dynamics is manifestly stochastic and nonconservative, but has a profound connection to conservative dynamics in physics. In the present paper the main ideas and logical steps leading to thermodynamics from Darwinian dynamics are…
Modern developments in nonequilibrium thermodynamics have significant implications for the origins of life. The reasons for this are closely related to a generalized version of the second law of thermodynamics recently found for entropy…
Photosynthesis converts sunlight into the chemical free energy that feeds the Earth's biosphere, yet at levels much lower than what thermodynamics would allow for. I propose here that photosynthesis is nevertheless thermodynamically…
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has long been an area of substantial interest to ecologists because most fundamental biological processes, such as protein synthesis and respiration, are inherently energy-consuming. Microbial communities are…
Many living organisms on Earth are strongly dependent on water, the natural liquid of the planet. A possible reason for that could be the conjecture of Ryoji Takahashi [Phys. Lett. A 141, 15 (1989)] that water microdrops release negentropy…
The habitable fraction of a planet's surface is important for the detectability of surface biosignatures. The extent and distribution of habitable areas is influenced by external parameters that control the planet's climate, atmospheric…
Nature's many complex systems--physical, biological, and cultural--are islands of low-entropy order within increasingly disordered seas of surrounding, high-entropy chaos. Energy is a principal facilitator of the rising complexity of all…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…
We consider a particular instance of the lift of controlled systems recently proposed in the theory of irreversible thermodynamics and show that it leads to a variational principle for an optimal control in the sense of Pontryagin. Then we…
Thermodynamic relations are derived from first principles of mechanics for non-equilibrium processes. Since the key role herein is played by the law of increase of entropy, the latter is analyzed at first. It is shown that its derivation…
Approximately one billion years (Gyr) in the future, as the Sun brightens, Earth's carbonate-silicate cycle is expected to drive CO$_2$ below the minimum level required by vascular land plants, eliminating most macroscopic land life. Here,…
If life is sustained by a process of photosynthesis, not necessarily the same existing on Earth, the surface temperature of the star and the orbit of the host planet cannot be whatsoever. In fact the global life cycle, no matter how…