Related papers: The Physics of Life: one molecule at a time
2019 marked the 75th anniversary of the publication of Erwin Schr\"{o}dinger's "What is Life?", a short book described by Roger Penrose in his preface to a reprint of this classic as "among the most influential scientific writings of the…
Biological molecules, like all active matter, use free energy to generate force and motion which drive them out of thermal equilibrium, and undergo inherent dynamic interconversion between metastable free energy states separated by levels…
Single-molecule biophysics has transformed our understanding of the fundamental molecular processes involved in living biological systems, but also of the fascinating physics of life. Far more exotic than a collection of exemplars of soft…
Schroedinger's book 'What is Life?' is widely credited for having played a crucial role in development of molecular and cellular biology. My essay revisits the issues raised by this book from the modern perspective of epigenetics and…
Quantum physics and biology have long been regarded as unrelated disciplines, describing nature at the inanimate microlevel on the one hand and living species on the other hand. Over the last decades the life sciences have succeeded in…
The rapidly increasing interest in the quantum properties of living matter stimulates a discussion of the fundamental properties of life as well as quantum mechanics. In this discussion often concepts are used that originate in philosophy…
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,…
This article frames the relation between biology and physics by characterizing the former as a subdiscipline rather than a special case of the latter. To do this, we posit biological physics as the science of living matter in contrast to…
The origins of life stands among the great open scientific questions of our time. While a number of proposals exist for possible starting points in the pathway from non-living to living matter, these have so far not achieved states of…
The molecular biology revolution of the last seventy five years has transformed our view of living systems. Scientific explanations of biological phenomena are now synonymous with the identification of the genes, proteins, and signaling…
This is a set of lectures that I presented at the Les Houches 2014 Summer School "Topological Aspects in Condensed Matter Physics". The lectures are an introduction to physics of proteins. To physicists, and by a physicist. My lectures at…
It is probably not a coincidence that two of the pioneers of thermodynamics, Helmholtz and Mayer, were physicians. Thermodynamics studies the transformations of energy, and such transformations ceaselessly take place in all living systems…
Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…
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…
In the 1970s, the renowned physicist Victor Weisskopf famously developed a research program to qualitatively explain properties of matter in terms of the fundamental constants of physics. But there was one type of matter prominently missing…
This is my attempt to answer Schr\"odinger's question: "What is Life?". In living cell the local combination of atoms is reproduced with incredible accuracy. In the case of protein biosynthesis the notion of the physical aspect of the…
There have been many claims that quantum mechanics plays a key role in the origin and/or operation of biological organisms, beyond merely providing the basis for the shapes and sizes of biological molecules and their chemical affinities.…
The multifarious internal workings of organisms are difficult to reconcile with a single feature defining a state of being alive. Indeed, definitions of life rely on emergent properties (growth, capacity to evolve, agency) only symptomatic…
The present view of biological phenomena is based on a biochemical paradigm that development of living organisms is defined by information stored in a molecular form as some genetic code. However, new discoveries indicate that biological…
Ever since the advent of quantum mechanics, it has been clear that the atoms composing matter do not obey Newton's laws. Instead, their behavior is described by the Schroedinger equation. Surprisingly though, until recently, no clear…