Related papers: The Physics of Life: one molecule at a time
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…
It is argued that all notions associated with the origin of life should be related with the participatory anthropic principle of Wheeler and must be extended into the realm of the multiverse. Also discussed is the notion that life can only…
Erwin Schrodinger famously and presciently ascribed the vehicle transmitting the hereditary information underlying life to an `aperiodic crystal'. We compare and contrast this, only later discovered to be stored in the linear biomolecule…
Embryogenesis, the process by which an organism forms and develops, has long been and still is a major field of investigation in the natural sciences. By which means, which forces, are embryonic cells and tissues assembled, deformed, and…
A critical assessment of the recent developments of molecular biology is presented. The thesis that they do not lead to a conceptual understanding of life and biological systems is defended. Maturana and Varela's concept of autopoiesis is…
We propose that the Schrodinger equation results from applying the classical wave equation to describe the physical system in which subatomic particles play random motion, thereby leading to quantum mechanics. The physical reality described…
In this article, we attempt to convince the reader that the origin of life was such an exceptionally unlikely event that it probably has never occurred elsewhere. This involves an explicit calculation using the laws of physics which, while…
The physical models of a successful unified theory about the Universe must operate in different phase of matter evolution and different fields of physics. The attempts to build such wide range theory as a bunch of theories developed for…
Life is a complex biological phenomenon represented by numerous chemical, physical and biological processes performed by a biothermodynamic system/cell/organism. Both living organisms and inanimate objects are subject to aging, a biological…
Aiming at providing an objective motion picture for the microscopic object described by the wave function, new analysis about motion is presented by use of the point set theory in mathematics, through which we show that a new kind of motion…
Schroedinger's equation gave early quantum theory a visual language that looked like physics again: a wave evolving by a linear differential equation. This essay argues that the same success also seeded a recurring impulse to keep quantum…
The distances over which biological molecules and their complexes can function range from a few nanometres, in the case of folded structures, to millimetres, for example during chromosome organization. Describing phenomena that cover such…
Molecular biology and biochemistry interpret microscopic processes in the living world in terms of molecular structures and their interactions, which are quantum mechanical by their very nature. Whereas the theoretical foundations of these…
Stapp and others have proposed that reality involves a fundamental life process, or creative process. It is shown how this process description may be unified with the description that derives from quantum physics. The methods of the quantum…
In recent years molecular elasticity has emerged as an active area of research: there are experiments that probe mechanical properties of single biomolecules such as DNA and Actin, with a view to understanding the role of elasticity of…
This paper explores the idea that information is an essential and distinctive feature of living systems. Unlike non-living systems, living systems actively acquire, process, and use information about their environments to respond to…
Quantum biology is an emerging field of research that concerns itself with the experimental and theoretical exploration of non-trivial quantum phenomena in biological systems. In this tutorial overview we aim to bring out fundamental…
Increasing numbers of physicists engage in research activities that address biological questions from physics perspectives or strive to develop physics insights from active biological processes. The on-going development and success of such…
The internal dynamics of strongly interacting systems and that of biomolecules such as proteins display several important analogies, despite the huge difference in their characteristic energy and length scales. For example, in all such…
Physics relies on mathematical spaces carefully matched to the phenomena under study. Phase space in classical mechanics, Hilbert space in quantum theory, configuration spaces in field theory all provide representations in which physical…