Related papers: When physics meets biology: a less known Feynman
In the period 1968 - 1974 I was a graduate student and then a postdoc at Caltech and was involved with the developments of the quark and parton models. Most of this time I worked in close contact with Richard Feynman and thus was present…
The broad debate on foundational issues in quantum mechanics, which took place at the famous 1957 Chapel Hill conference on \textit{The Role of Gravitation in Physics}, is here critically analyzed with an emphasis on Richard Feynman's…
The sciences of complexity present some recurrent themes: the emergence of qualitatively new behaviors in dissipative systems out of equilibrium, the aparent tendency of complex system to lie at the border of phase transitions and…
In this paper, the origin of discrete dynamics is stated from a historical point of view, as well as its main ideas: fixed and periodic points, chaotic behaviour, bifurcations. This travel will begin with Poincar\'e's work and will finish…
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 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 reader surely knows what particles physics is about: finding building blocks of nature that appear elementary at a given time and study their interactions - so why in the world this essay? The problem is how to arrive at a fundamental…
John Desmond Bernal (1901-1970) was one of the most eminent scientists in molecular biology, and also regarded as the founding father of the Science of Science. His book The Social Function of Science laid the theoretical foundations for…
The origin of life is shrouded in mystery, with few surviving clues, obscured by evolutionary competition. Previous reviews have touched on the complementary approaches of top-down and bottom-up synthetic biology to augment our…
This is a write-up of Sidney Coleman's classic lecture first given as a Dirac Lecture at Cambridge University and later recorded when repeated at the New England sectional meeting of the American Physical Society (April 9, 1994). My sources…
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…
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…
In 1965, Feynman wrote of using a lattice containing one dimension of space and one dimension of time to derive aspects of quantum mechanics. Instead of summing the behavior of all possible paths as he did, this paper will consider the…
The career and accomplishments of Julian Schwinger, who shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1965, have been reviewed in numerous books and articles. For this reason these Memories, which seek to convey a sense of Schwinger's remarkable…
This review provides a brief account of the life of Eugene Parker (1927-2022) and discusses his contributions to plasma astrophysics. Growing up in Michigan, he went to graduate school at Caltech and then worked at the University of Utah…
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…
Dawning neutron physics was more complex than one might expect. The chance that the neutron comprised a proton and an electron was diffusely taken into account after the discovery of the neutron. Moreover, uncertainties persisted about the…
We retrace an ab initio relativistic derivation of Maxwell's equations that was developed by Feynman in unpublished notes, clarifying the analogies and the differences with analogous treatments present in the literature. Unlike the latter,…
Philosophers have spilled much ink over the discovery of ideas in the classical 'context of discovery'. However, there has been little engagement with the question of what constitutes a discovery of 'things in the world'. A much-overlooked…
Not only did Turing help found one of the most exciting areas of modern science (computer science), but it may be that his contribution to our understanding of our physical reality is greater than we had hitherto supposed. Here I explore…