Related papers: Schr\"{o}dinger's "What is Life?" at 75
Since its inception six decades ago, astrobiology has diversified immensely to encompass several scientific questions including the origin and evolution of Terran life, the organic chemical composition of extraterrestrial objects, and the…
Astrobiology is usually defined as the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe. As such it is inherently interdisciplinary and cannot help but engender a worldview infused by cosmic and evolutionary…
Darwin's book, Origin of the Species has been a source of public controversy for more than hundred and fifty years. Court cases and mountains of words have not dispelled this controversy. In this paper, a quantitative approach using simple…
Time is one of the undisputed foundations of our life in the real world. Here it is argued that inside small isolated quantum systems, time does not pass as we are used to, and it is primarily in this sense that quantum objects enjoy only…
One of the longstanding debates in the history of paleontology focuses on the issue of whether or not there have been long term cycles (operating over tens of millions of years) in biodiversity and extinction. Here we consider the history…
Both at formal and philosophical levels, decades of efforts have been devoted to a deciphering of the `quantum enigma', the `crazy way quantum objects behave', to quote R.P. Feynman's words. We posit that the enigma cannot recede without…
Why life is complex and --most importantly-- what is the origin of the over abundance of complexity in nature? This is a fundamental scientific question which, paraphrasing the late Per Bak, "is screaming to be answered but seldom is even…
Physics of Life research in the UK is proving to be transformative to scientific insight and translational impact, but challenges remain. Here I discuss its disruptive potential and the barriers to interdisciplinary research seen through…
Life has a special status, it even has its own science: biology. In many ways, the logic of life seems to differ from that of atoms, molecules, planets, or any other `inanimate object'. However, life is increasingly measured using…
The path toward the emergence of life in our biosphere involved several key events allowing for the persistence, reproduction and evolution of molecular systems. All these processes took place in a given environmental context and required…
Metaphysics is the science of being and asks the question ``What really exists?'' The answer to this question has been sought for by mankind since the beginning of recorded time. In the past 2500 years there have been many answers to this…
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…
The multifarious internal workings of organisms are difficult to reconcile with a single feature defining a state of being alive. Indeed, definitions of life rely on emergent properties (growth, capacity to evolve, agency) only symptomatic…
The existence of life is one of the most fundamental problems of astrophysics. The intriguing existence of progressively complex and apparently improbable living beings should be a general tendency of life in the Universe. We are looking…
Understanding the origin(s) of life (OoL) is a fundamental challenge for science in the 21st century. Research on OoL spans many disciplines, including chemistry, physics, biology, planetary sciences, computer science, mathematics and…
Despite the success of modern physics in formulating mathematical theories that can predict the outcome of quantum-scale experiments, the physical interpretations of these theories remain controversial. In this manuscript, we propose a new…
In the past century many fundamental results on unpredictability, undecidability and uncertainty have compelled scientists to grapple with the idea that some questions may never be resolved within our current theories. While this…
Energy has no definition, except that given by a conservation principle which essentially amounts to defining it as the elements of an open list of unknown cardinality. Entropy, identified by Shannon as information we lack, has too many…
This paper discusses, from a mathematician's point of view, the thesis formulated by Israel Gelfand, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, and one of the pioneers of mathematical biology: "There is only one thing which is…
For nearly 100 years, the paradox of Schr\"odinger's Cat has remained unresolved. Why does the world we live in appear classical despite being composed of quantum particles governed by the Schr\"odinger wave equation? Lajos Di\'osi and…