Related papers: When physics meets biology: a less known Feynman
The discipline of `theoretical biology' has been developing from its inception several decades ago almost in parallel with the advances in biology, so much so that the latter is often considered to be almost exclusively an empirical…
The unification of gravity and quantum mechanics remains one of the most profound open questions in science. With recent advances in quantum technology, an experimental idea first proposed by Richard Feynman is now regarded as a promising…
I am most honoured to have the privilege to present the Foreword to this fascinating and wonderfully varied collection of contributions, concerning the nature of computation and of its deep connection with the operation of those basic laws,…
The 75th anniversary of Turing's seminal paper and his centennial year anniversary occur in 2011 and 2012, respectively. It is natural to review and assess Turing's contributions in diverse fields in the light of new developments that his…
Our understanding of the evolutionary process has gone a long way since the publication, 150 years ago, of "On the origin of species" by Charles R. Darwin. The XXth Century witnessed great efforts to embrace replication, mutation, and…
In the 80th anniversary book for Alex M\"uller I wrote a story of our scientific collaboration, Shared Fascinations. This time I will be more personal, about the human side of our collaboration and encounters, while also referring to…
2011 marked the hundredth anniversary both of the famous Solvay conferences, and of the Geiger-Marsden experiment that launched the modern understanding of subatomic structure. I was asked to survey the status and prospects of particle…
Heisenberg's breakthrough in his July 1925 paper that set in motion the development of Quantum Mechanics through subsequent papers by Born, Jordan, Heisenberg and also Dirac (from 1925 to 1927) is reexamined through a modern lens. In this…
The paper is based on a talk given to celebrate {\O}rsted's discovery of electromagnetism in 1820. It gives a brief account of {\O}rsted's life and work, before using the evidence of articles on electricity and magnetism in the…
In one of his books [$\textit{The Feynmann Lectures on Physics}$, vol. 2], Feynman presents a didactic approach to introduce basic ideas about tensors, using, as a first example, the dependence of the induced polarization of a crystal on…
Brief recollections by the author of how he interacted with Feynman and was influenced by him.
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…
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…
Ninety years ago, in 1922, Alexander Friedman (1888-1925) demonstrated for the first time that the General Relativity equations admit non-static solutions and thus the Universe may expand, contract, collapse, and even be born. The…
The renewed interest in the foundations of quantum statistical mechanics in recent years has led us to study John von Neumann's 1929 article on the quantum ergodic theorem. We have found this almost forgotten article, which until now has…
Recent developments in elementary quantum mechanics have seen a number of extraordinary claims regarding quantum behaviour, and even questioning internal consistency of the theory. These are, we argue, different disguises of what Feynman…
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…
The von Neumann attitude on such a deep interpretational question as the role of a human observer in order for the quantum description of measurement to be consistent has been long misrepresented. The large majority of the subsequent…
The search for what differentiates inanimate matter from living things began in antiquity as a search for a "fundamental life force" embedded deep within living things - a special material unit owned only by life - later transforming to…
We metaphorically call "Grammar of Biology" a small field of genomic research, whose main objective is to search for intrinsic DNA sequence properties. Erwin Chargaff inaugurated it back in 50s, but since then little progress has been made.…