Related papers: Origins of Life: A Problem for Physics
In these proceedings we illustrate that light, very weakly interacting particles can arise naturally from physics which is fundamentally connected to very high energy scales. Searching for them therefore may give us interesting new insights…
Being mathematics a natural language to Mankind and to physics, it must be constantly adapted to our necessities and our natural perception. Then, mathematical concepts are not absolute to reality. Although mathematical theories are…
We dwell upon the physicist's conception of `life' since Schroedinger and Wigner through to the modern-day language of living systems in the light of quantum information. We discuss some basic features of a living system such as ordinary…
Where does it all come from? Where are we going? Are we alone in the universe? What is good and what is evil? The scientific narrative of cosmic evolution demands that we tackle such big questions with a cosmological perspective. I tackle…
What is physics? What are the limits of what physics can say about the world? In seeking ever-broader theoretical `umbrellas' for physical phenomena, we are seeking unifying principles. Emergent phenomena have turned out to be some of the…
In this review we explore aspects of the field of astrobiology from an astronomical viewpoint. We therefore focus on the origin of life in the context of planetary formation, with additional emphasis on tracing the most abundant volatile…
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…
This work is an attempt for a state-of-the-art survey of natural and life sciences with the goal to define the scope and address the central questions of an original research program. It is focused on the phenomena of emergence, adaptive…
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…
The aim of this thesis is to question some of the basic assumptions that go into building the $\Lambda$CDM model of our universe. The assumptions we focus on are the initial conditions of the universe, the fundamental forces in the universe…
One thing that discriminates living things from inanimate matter is their ability to generate similarly complex or non-random architectures in a large abundance. From DNA sequences to folded protein structures, living cells, microbial…
We suggest that the question of why is there something rather than nothing can be answered by the existence of two types of nothing. We propose that matter occurs at the boundaries of intersection of both nothings. This accords with the…
Many of the numbers appearing in the laws of physics, such as the strength of electromagnetism or the masses of elementary particles, must lie in precise ranges for stars, planets, and chemistry to exist. Why the universe has these values…
The grand challenges in biology today are being shaped by powerful high-throughput technologies that have revealed the genomes of many organisms, global expression patterns of genes and detailed information about variation within…
The present discussion concerning certain fundamental physical theories (such as string theory and multiverse cosmology) has reopened the demarcation problem between science and non-science. While parts of the physics community see the…
If our universe has appeared in a result of Big Bang or something like this, whether we have reasons to deny an existence of other universes appearing by the same or similar way? An objection that there is no anything like it, is doubtful,…
The way we view the reality of nature, including ourselves, depend on consciousness.It also defines the identity of the person, since we know people in terms of their experiences. In general, consciousness defines human existence in this…
A modified version of panspermia theory, named Nebula-Relay hypothesis or local panspermia, is introduced to explain the origin of life on Earth. Primitive life, acting as the seeds of life on Earth, originated at pre-solar epoch through…
The Hadean, once thought to be uninhabitable and tumultuous, has more recently been recontextualized as a clement time in which oceans, land, and life likely appeared on Earth. This non-exhaustive chapter follows multiple threads from…
Are time-travels possible? is the past still existing? and is the future already existing? We try to give an answer to these an other questions concerning the properties of time and the close connection (but deep physical difference)…