Related papers: The Physics of Life: one molecule at a time

The molecular machinery of life is largely created via self-organisation of individual molecules into functional assemblies. Minimal coarse-grained models, where a whole macromolecule is represented by a small number of particles, can be of…

Environmental science almost invariably proposes problems of extreme complexity, typically characterized by strongly nonlinear evolution dynamics. The systems under investigation have many degrees of freedom - which makes them complicated -…

Any search for present or past life beyond Earth should consider the initial processes and related environmental controls that might have led to its start. As on Earth, such an understanding lies well beyond how simple organic molecules…

A common feature of the recent calls for reform of the undergraduate biology curriculum has been for better coordination between biology and the courses from the allied disciplines of mathematics, chemistry, and physics. Physics has lagged…

Here I show that a classical or quantum bit state plus one simple operation, an action, are sufficient ingredients to derive a quantum dynamical equation that rules the sequential changes of the state. Then, by assuming that a freely moving…

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…

This article aims to introduce the broad field of soft active matter physics and its relevance to the life sciences in simple, accessible language. Although this area of research is relatively new, it has already demonstrated significant…

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…

The origin and early evolution of eukaryotes are one of the major transitions in the evolution of life on earth. One of its most interesting aspects is the emergence of cellular organelles, their dynamics, their functions, and their…

During the past two decades, cosmologists turned to particle physics in order to explore the physics of the very early Universe. The main link between the physics of the smallest and largest structures in the Universe is the idea of…

This introductory text on the basics of quantum mechanics is intended to serve as a kind of travel guide through the quantum world. It starts by asking whether quantum physics is important, or weird, or incomprehensible. It explains why…

Many mechanisms, functions and structures of life have been unraveled. However, the fundamental driving force that propelled chemical evolution and led to life has remained obscure. The 2nd law of thermodynamics, written as an equation of…

Biology is considered here as an "emergent science" in the sense of Anderson and of Laughlin and Pines. It is demonstrated that a straightforward mathematical definition of "biological system" is useful in showing how biology differs in…

Now that we have reached the centennial of Erwin Schrodinger's seminal paper introducing the wavefunction theory of matter, it is right and proper to inquire as to its legacy. It is undeniable that today every paper in atomic physics cites…

We present a theory of discontinuous motion of particles in continuous space-time. We show that the simplest nonrelativistic evolution equation of such motion is just the Schroedinger equation in quantum mechanics. This strongly implies…

The importance of molecular-scale forces in sculpting biological form and function has been acknowledged for more than a century. Accounting for forces in biology is a problem that lies at the intersection of soft condensed matter physics,…

We develop an extension of Bohmian mechanics by defining Bohm-like trajectories for quantum particles in a curved background space-time containing a spacelike singularity. As an example of such a metric we use the Schwarzschild metric,…

This manuscript deals with a model of the evolution of an event space represented by the fundamental solution of a N-dimensional generalized Schrodinger equation for free matter. Specifically this solution can be applied to describe the 3D…

The question whether quantum mechanics is complete and the nature of the transition between quantum mechanics and classical mechanics have intrigued physicists for decades. There have been many experimental breakthroughs in creating larger…

Bohmian mechanics is the most naively obvious embedding imaginable of Schr\"odinger's equation into a completely coherent physical theory. It describes a world in which particles move in a highly non-Newtonian sort of way, one which may at…