Related papers: Life's Solutions are Not Ideal
Water adopts many different crystal structures in its solid form. These provide insight into potential structures of water even in its liquid phase, and they can be used to calibrate pair potentials used for simulation of water. In crowded…
The behaviour of a system of ion channels formed across the cell membrane is presented. The infinite number of channels with an infinite coupling is introduced first as a reference point for the detailed derivation of the…
A new one-dimensional fluid model for ions in weakly-ionized plasma is proposed. The model differs from the existing ones in two aspects. First, a more accurate approximation of the collision terms in the fluid equations is suggested. For…
Nearly all cell models explicitly or implicitly deal with the biophysical constraints that must be respected for life to persist. Despite this, there is almost no systematicity in how these constraints are implemented, and we lack a…
The response of polar solvents to ions and polar molecules dictates many fundamental molecular processes. To understand such electrostatically-driven solvation processes, one ideally would probe the dielectric response of a solvent to an…
Computation of biological processes creates great promise for everyday life and great challenges for physical scientists. Simulations of molecular dynamics appeal to biologists as a natural extension of structural biology. Once biologists…
Apparent biodiversity on earth exists only if we compare different species separated from their environments. Meanwhile coexisting species have to be identical in terms of energetic interactions. Consider the biosphere as a network of…
Equilibrium is a rather ideal situation, the exception rather than the rule in Nature. Whenever the external or internal parameters of a physical system are varied its subsequent relaxation to equilibrium may be either impossible or take…
Quantum physics is a linear theory, so it is somewhat puzzling that it can underlie very complex systems such as digital computers and life. This paper investigates how this is possible. Physically, such complex systems are necessarily…
We discuss the anthropic principle and its implications for our existence and the physical laws which govern the universe. Several amazing coincidences which provide conditions necessary for creation of life suggest that the "laws of…
We provide evidence from full numerical solutions that the hydrodynamical evolution of initial density fluctuations in heavy ion collisions can be understood order-by-order in a perturbative series in deviations from a smooth and…
The discipline of `theoretical biology' has been developing from its inception several decades ago almost in parallel with the advances in biology, so much so that the latter is often considered to be almost exclusively an empirical…
We propose a novel definition of life in terms of which its emergence in the universe is expected, and its ever-creative open-ended evolution is entailed by no law. Living organisms are Kantian Wholes that achieve Catalytic Closure,…
The biological cell exhibits a fantastic range of behaviors, but ultimately these are governed by a handful of physical and chemical principles. Here we explore simple theory, known for decades and based on the simple thermodynamics of…
Recent molecular simulation and integral equation results alkali-halide ion pair potentials-of-mean-force in water are discussed. Dielectric model calculations are implemented to check that these models produce that characteristic structure…
Life has a special status, it even has its own science: biology. In many ways, the logic of life seems to differ from that of atoms, molecules, planets, or any other `inanimate object'. However, life is increasingly measured using…
Treating water as a linearly responding dielectric continuum on molecular length scales allows very simple estimates of solvation structure and thermodynamics for charged and polar solutes. While this approach can successfully account for…
This thesis broadly concerns the origins of life problem, pursuing a joint approach that combines general philosophical/conceptual reflection on the problem along with more detailed and formal scientific modelling work oriented in the…
A new class of accelerating, exact, explicit and simple solutions of relativistic hydrodynamics is presented. Since these new solutions yield a finite rapidity distribution, they lead to an advanced estimate of the initial energy density…
The association of ions in electrolyte solutions at very low concentration and low temperature is studied using computer simulations and quasi-chemical ion-pairing theory. The specific case of the restricted primitive model (charged hard…