Related papers: Schr\"{o}dinger's "What is Life?" at 75
The cells and tissues that make up our body juggle contradictory mechanical demands. It is crucial for their survival to be able to withstand large mechanical loads, but it is equally crucial for them to produce forces and actively change…
In this letter we present an analytic evidence of the non-integrability of the discrete nonlinear Schroedinger equation, a well-known discrete evolution equation which has been obtained in various contexts of physics and biology. We use a…
The problematic relationship between science and philosophy has, since the beginning of modernity, divided the world into two separate domains: nature and human. Some of today's schools of philosophy and epistemological inquiry have…
An extrapolation of the genetic complexity of organisms to earlier times suggests that life began before the Earth was formed. Life may have started from systems with single heritable elements that are functionally equivalent to a…
We propose that the Schrodinger equation results from applying the classical wave equation to describe the physical system in which subatomic particles play random motion, thereby leading to quantum mechanics. The physical reality described…
The Schr\"odinger equation is universally accepted due to its excellent predictions aligning with observed results within its defined conditions. Nevertheless, it does not seem to possess the simplicity of fundamental laws, such as Newton's…
Until presently, most approaches for understanding physiological or pathological phenomena have been based on the assumption that these processes start from individual cells, a concept introduced primarily by Virchow in the 19th century.…
It is high time to openly and without finalism define the dangerous but needed term 'purposeful information', whose quantity is an Eigen information value. Using the term 'biological information' in its stead forces one into an…
Since Galileo and (more recently) D'Arcy Thompson, it has been understood that physical processes and constraints influence biological structures and their resulting functions. However these cross-discpline connections -- and their…
Proteins are the common constituents of all living cells. They are molecular machines that interact with each other as well as with other cell products and carry out a dizzying array of functions with distinction. These interactions follow…
This is a chapter for an upcoming book, "Space, Time, and the Limits of Human Understanding", edited by Shyam Wuppuluri and Giancarlo Ghirardi. I first present the classical picture of flat space and ever-flowing time, as generally accepted…
In his 1989 essay, John Archibald Wheeler has tried to answer the eternal question of existence. He did it by searching for links between information, physics, and quanta. The main concept emerging from his essay is that "every physical…
This article, dedicated, with admiration to Reuben Hersh, for his forthcoming 90th birthday, argues that mathematics today is not yet a science, but that it is high time that it should become one.
Global celebration greeted the 2012 discovery at CERN's Large Hadron Collider of a particle that matches the textbook description of the Higgs boson. That achievement validated a remarkable chain of theoretical reasoning that combined the…
It is undeniable that life as we know it depends on liquid water. It is difficult to imagine any biochemical machinery that does not require water. On Earth, life adapts to the most diverse environments and, once established, it is very…
Molecular biology is a nanotechnology that works--it has worked for billions of years and in an amazing variety of circumstances. At its core is a system for acquiring, processing and communicating information that is universal, from…
The master equation describing non-equilibrium one-dimensional problems like diffusion limited reactions or critical dynamics of classical spin systems can be written as a Schr\"odinger equation in which the wave function is the probability…
Julian Schwinger (1918--1994), founder of renormalized quantum electrodynamics, was arguably the leading theoretical physicist of the second half of the 20th century. Thus it is not surprising that he made contributions to gravity theory as…
Experimental verification of the theoretical predictions made by Albert Einstein in his paper, published in 1905, on the molecular mechanisms of Brownian motion established the existence of atoms. In the last 100 years discoveries of many…
It is well known that life on Earth alters its environment over evolutionary and geological timescales. An important open question is whether this is a result of evolutionary optimization or a universal feature of life. In the latter case,…