Related papers: A Thermodynamic Approach towards the Question "Wha…
Eukaryote genomes contain excessively introns, inter-genic and other non-genic sequences that appear to have no vital functional role or phenotype manifestation. Their existence, a long-standing puzzle, is viewed from the principle of…
The study of particle creation phenomena at the expense of the gravitational field is of great research interest. It might solve the cosmological puzzle single-handedly, without the need for either dark energy or the modified theory of…
The process of evolution by natural selection leads to phenotypes of increasing fitness. For cellular chemical reaction networks, this means optimising a variety of fitness functions such as robustness, precision, or sensitivity to external…
Biological and engineered systems operate by coupling function to the transfer of heat and/or particles down a thermal or chemical gradient. In idealized \textit{deterministically} driven systems, thermodynamic control can be exerted…
From a new rigorous formulation of the general axiomatic foundations of thermodynamics we derive an operational definition of entropy that responds to the emergent need in many technological frameworks to understand and deploy thermodynamic…
It is not currently possible to create a living organism ab initio due to the overwhelming complexity of biological systems. In fact, the origin of life mechanism, this being how biological organisms form from non-living matter, is unknown.…
All living cells interact dynamically with a constantly changing world. Eukaryotes in particular, evolved radically new ways to sense and react to their environment. These advances enabled new and more complex forms of cellular behavior in…
Living systems are thermodynamically open but closed in their organization. In other words, even though their material components turn over constantly, a material-independent property persists, which we call organization. Moreover,…
We quantify the amount of regulation required to control growth in living cells by a Maximum Entropy approach to the space of underlying metabolic states described by genome-scale models. Results obtained for E. coli and human cells are…
Active biological systems reside far from equilibrium, dissipating heat even in their steady state, thus requiring an extension of conventional equilibrium thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. In this Letter, we have extended the…
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…
Motivated by the notion that the mathematics of gravity can be reproduced from a statistical requirement of maximal entropy, we study the consequence of introducing an entropic source term in the Einstein-Hilbert action. For a spatially…
I give a quick overview of some of the theoretical background necessary for using modern non-equilibrium statistical physics to investigate the thermodynamics of computation. I first present some of the necessary concepts from information…
Entropy serves as a central observable in equilibrium thermodynamics. However, many biological and ecological systems operate far from thermal equilibrium. Here we show that entropy production can characterize the behavior of such…
The response of ecosystems to perturbations is considered from a thermodynamic perspective by acknowledging that, as for all macroscopic systems and processes, the dynamics and stability of ecosystems is subject to definite thermodynamic…
For more than 3.5 billion years, life experienced dramatic environmental extremes on Earth. These include shifts from oxygen-less to over-oxygenated atmospheres and cycling between hothouse conditions and global glaciations. Meanwhile, an…
Life forms exhibit such a degree of exquisite organization that it seems impossible that they could have developed out of a process of trial and error, as intimated by the theory of Darwinian evolution. In this general public paper I…
Current evidence suggests that the cosmological constant is not zero, or that we live in an open universe. We examine the implications for the future under these assumptions, and find that they are striking. If the Universe is cosmological…
We model evolution of plants in a world, made up of different locations, with multiple environments (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subsets of locations). Each environment (landmass) has temperature, rainfall, and other…
We discuss the evolution of the Universe from what might be called its quantum origin. We apply the uncertainty principle to the origin of the Universe with characteristic time scale equal to the Planck time to obtain its initial…