Related papers: Schr\"{o}dinger's "What is Life?" at 75
In this lecture, intended for a general audience, I describe Schr\"odinger's thought experiment which was designed to show the strange results of extending the formalism of quantum theory, particularly the idea of superposition, beyond the…
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…
The affirmative statement of the existence of extraterrestrial life is tentatively raised to the status of a principle. Accordingly, Fermi's question is answered and the anthropic principle is shown to be falsifiable. The time-scale for the…
The following is an unedited version of two short articles that are forthcoming in Nature Chemical Engineering. Inspired by Purcell's classic lecture "Life at low Reynolds number", I discuss how scaling arguments, dimensional analysis, and…
The paper attempts to convince that the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics does not contradict philosophical realism by throwing light onto certain properties of quantum systems that seem to have escaped attention as yet. The…
Life is a planetary feature that depends on its environment, but it has also strongly shaped the physical conditions on Earth, having created conditions highly suitable for a productive biosphere. Clearly, the second law of thermodynamics…
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…
Improving the scientific literacy of non-scientists is an important goal, both because of the ever-increasing impact of science and technology on our lives, and because understanding science enriches our experience of the natural world. One…
Well protected human and laboratory animal populations with abundant resources are evolutionary unprecedented. Physical approach, which takes advantage of their extensively quantified mortality, establishes that its dominant fraction yields…
In 1979 Penrose hypothesized that the arrows of time are explained by the hypothesis that the fundamental laws are time irreversible. That is, our reversible laws, such as the standard model and general relativity are effective, and emerge…
Many mechanisms, functions and structures of life have been unraveled. However, the fundamental driving force that propelled chemical evolution and led to life has remained obscure. The 2nd law of thermodynamics, written as an equation of…
The fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life has received a great deal of attention in recent years, both in the philosophical and scientific literature. The claim is that in the space of possible physical laws, parameters and…
Biological evolution is a complex blend of ever changing structural stability, variability and emergence of new phenotypes, niches, ecosystems. We wish to argue that the evolution of life marks the end of a physics world view of law…
The classical "game of life" (GOL) due to Conway is a famous mathematical game constructed as a two-dimensional cellular automaton in which each cell is either alive or dead. A set of evolutionary rules determines whether a cell dies,…
One of the longest standing open problems in science is how life arises from non-living matter. If it is possible to measure this transition in the lab, then it might be possible to understand the physical mechanisms by which the emergence…
A critical assessment of the recent developments of molecular biology is presented. The thesis that they do not lead to a conceptual understanding of life and biological systems is defended. Maturana and Varela's concept of autopoiesis is…
Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…
We study bifurcations in a spatially extended nonlinear system representing population dynamics with the help of analytic calculations based on the time-independent Schr\"{o}dinger equation for a quantum particle subjected to a uniform…
Schr\"odinger's famous Gedankenexperiment has inspired multiple generations of physicists to think about apparent paradoxes that arise when the logic of quantum physics is applied to macroscopic objects. The development of quantum…
It is pointed out that the mystery of how biological systems measure their lengths vanishes away if one premises that they have discovered a way to generate linear waves analogous to compressional sound. These can be used to detect length…