Related papers: Can we make biochemistry an exact science?
Kirchhoff's current law is thought to describe the translational movement of charged particles through resistors. But Kirchhoff's law is widely used to describe movements of current through resistors in high speed devices. Current at high…
Classical theories of chemical kinetics assume independent reactions in dilute solutions, whose rates are determined by mean concentrations. In condensed matter, strong interactions alter chemical activities and create inhomogeneities that…
We extend the energetic variational approach so it can be applied to a chemical reaction system with general mass action kinetics. Our approach starts with an energy-dissipation law. We show that the chemical equilibrium is determined by…
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…
The movement of ionic solutions is an essential part of biology and technology. Fluidics, from nano- to micro- to microfluidics, is a burgeoning area of technology which is all about the movement of ionic solutions, on various scales. Many…
The law of action-reaction, considered by Ernst Mach the cornerstone of physics, is thoroughly used to derive the conservation laws of linear and angular momentum. However, the conflict between momentum conservation law and Newton's third…
The Poisson-Boltzmann mean-field description of ionic solutions has been successfully used in predicting charge distributions and interactions between charged macromolecules. While the electrostatic model of charged fluids, on which the…
One of the outstanding problems of philosophy of science and mathematics today is whether there is just "one" unique mathematics or the same can be bifurcated into "pure" and "applied" categories. A novel solution for this problem is…
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 -…
In recent years considerable portion of the computer science community has focused its attention on understanding living cell biochemistry and efforts to understand such complication reaction environment have spread over wide front, ranging…
Biology is perhaps the most complex of the sciences, given the incredible variety of chemical species that are interconnected in spatial and temporal pathways that are daunting to understand. Their interconnections lead to emergent…
Quantum-mechanical analysis based on an exact sum rule is used to extract an semiclassical angle-dependent energy function for transition metal ions in biomolecules. The angular dependence is simple but different from existing classical…
In teaching the physical sciences, a significant challenge lies in the student's tendency to consider the scientific world and the "real" world as separate. For example, Newton's 1st Law of Motion states that an object in motion remains in…
Conservation laws are the pillars of physics. It's what we held on to when our imagination was challenged during the days of relativity or quantum mechanics. Their violation leads to the most absurd models, so excellently exercised in the…
An obstacle to the development of direct action version of electromagnetism was that in the end it failed to fulfill its initial promise of avoiding the problem of infinite Coulomb self-energy in the Maxwell theory of the classical point…
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…
The kinetics of chemical reactions are determined by the law of mass action, which has been successfully applied to homogeneous, dilute mixtures. At non-dilute conditions, interactions among the components can give rise to coexisting…
We review recent advances in the physics of strongly interacting charged systems functioning in water at room temperature. We concentrate on the phenomena which go beyond the framework of mean field theories, whether linear Debye-Huckel or…
Comprehensive and predictive simulation of coupled reaction networks has long been a goal of biology and other fields. Currently, metabolic network models that utilize enzyme mass action kinetics have predictive power but are limited in…
Biological approximations, which are universal for diverse species, are well known. With no other experimental data, their invariance to transformations from one species to another yields exact conservation (with respect to biological…