Related papers: Why did life emerge?
In this paper we review and extend our earlier recent work on thermostated systems. A description of nano-biological systems by Markov chains in coordinate space in the strongly overdamped limit is presented. Characterization of the most…
It is often stated that there are no laws in biology, where everything is contingent and could have been otherwise, being solely the result of historical accidents. Furthermore, the customary introduction of fundamental biological entities…
According to the second law of thermodynamics, the arrow of time points to an ever increasing entropy of the Universe. However, exactly how the entropy evolves with time and what drives the growth remain largely unknown. Here, for the first…
A longstanding challenge in nonequilibrium thermodynamics is to predict the emergence of self-organized behaviours and functionalities typical of living matter. Despite the progress with classical complex systems, it remains far from…
Although it has been notoriously difficult to pin down precisely what it is that makes life so distinctive and remarkable, there is general agreement that its informational aspect is one key property, perhaps the key property. The unique…
Statistical description of the Universe as non-equilibrium system has been proposed. Based on two fundamental principles, i.e., the law of increasing entropy and the principle of minimum energy of the system and try to answer the question…
We analyse the unreduced, nonperturbative dynamics of an arbitrary many-body interaction process with the help of the generalised effective potential method and reveal the well-specified universal origin of change (emergence), time and…
We employ the law of increasing entropy and the assumption about the decrease of the ground state energy to answer the question what are the reasons of the Big Bang and the origin of the Universe.
The species-area relationship is one of the central generalizations in ecology however its origin has remained a puzzle. Since ecosystems are understood as energy transduction systems, the regularities in species richness are considered to…
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…
In a previous paper [1] we considered the question, "What underlying property of nature is responsible for the second law?" A simple answer can be stated in terms of information: The fundamental loss of information gives rise to the second…
The essence of the second law of classical thermodynamics is the `entropy principle' which asserts the existence of an additive and extensive entropy function, S, that is defined for all equilibrium states of thermodynamic systems and whose…
We investigate the laws of thermodynamics in an accelerating universe driven by dark energy with a time-dependent equation of state. In the case we consider that the physically relevant part of the Universe is that envelopped by the…
As Nature's version of machine learning, evolution has solved many extraordinarily complex problems, none perhaps more remarkable than learning to harness an increase in chemical entropy (disorder) to generate directed chemical forces…
Trying to identify the entropy production within a cell has been part of debates and studies in the last century. First the idea was to make a resemblance of a cell with a Carnot engine, which is the most thermodynamically perfect machine.…
Assuming that the universe is a system obedient to known thermodynamic laws and equations, here we explore whether it is a possibility for the universe to exist and evolve without any cosmic structure or force necessarily emerging within…
We provide a non-equilibrium thermodynamic description of the life-cycle of a droplet based, chemically feasible, system of protocells. By coupling the protocells metabolic kinetics with its thermodynamics, we demonstrate how the system can…
The natural evolution of life seems to proceed through steps characterized by phases of relatively rapid changes, followed by longer, more stable periods. In the light of the string-theory derived physical scenario proposed in [1], we…
Darwin's hypothesis that all extant life forms are descendants of a last common ancestor cell and diversification of life forms results from gradual mutation plus natural selection represents a mainstream view that has influenced biology…
The most important thermodynamic work performed by life today is the dissipation of the solar photon flux into heat through organic pigments in water. From this thermodynamic perspective, biological evolution is thus just the dispersal of…