Related papers: A Physics Model for Origin of Life
We briefly review false-vacuum decay and examine a recent proposal by Frampton to model the origin of the first single-celled organism (SCO) as a phase transition between no-life and life vacua. In his calculation the exponent $n$ entering…
One of the most interesting unsolved questions in science today is the question of life on other planets. At the present time it is safe to say that we do not have much of an idea as to whether life is common or exceedingly rare in the…
The origins of life stands among the great open scientific questions of our time. While a number of proposals exist for possible starting points in the pathway from non-living to living matter, these have so far not achieved states of…
The origin of life and the origin of the universe are among the most important problems of science and they might be inextricably linked. Hydro-gravitational-dynamics (HGD) cosmology predicts hydrogen-helium gas planets in clumps as the…
A mathematical model of the natural origin of our universe is presented. The model is based only on well-established physics. No claim is made that this model uniquely represents exactly how the universe came about. But the viability of a…
The origin of life on Earth via the spontaneous emergence of a protocell prior to Darwinian evolution remains a fundamental open question in physics and chemistry. Here, we develop a conceptual framework based on information theory and…
The probability that life spontaneously emerges in a suitable environment (abiogenesis) is one of the major unknowns in astrobiology. Assessing its value is impeded by the lack of an accepted theory for the origin of life, and is further…
Despite great advances in our understanding of the formation of the Solar System, the evolution of the Earth, and the chemical basis for life, we are not much closer than the ancient Greeks to an answer of whether life has arisen and…
We propose a novel definition of life in terms of which its emergence in the universe is expected, and its ever-creative open-ended evolution is entailed by no law. Living organisms are Kantian Wholes that achieve Catalytic Closure,…
The origin of life is often framed primarily as a chemical problem, yet life's defining feature is evolution. Advances in geochemistry, prebiotic chemistry, and molecular biology have produced diverse scenarios for the emergence of genomes,…
We survey some of the philosophical challenges and pitfalls within origins research. Several of these challenges exhibit circularities, paradoxes, or anthropic biases. We present origins approaches in terms of three broad categories:…
A simple stochastic model for evolution, based upon the need to pass a sequence of n critical steps (Carter 1983, Watson 2008) is applied to both terrestrial and extraterrestrial origins of life. In the former case, the time at which humans…
A simple, heuristic formula with parallels to the Drake Equation is introduced to help focus discussion on open questions for the origins of life in a planetary context. This approach indicates a number of areas where quantitative progress…
It has been proven recently that the Standard Model of particle physics has electric charge quantization built into it. It has also been shown by the author that there was no electric charge in the early universe. Further it is shown here…
Is life most likely to emerge at the present cosmic time near a star like the Sun? We address this question by calculating the relative formation probability per unit time of habitable Earth-like planets within a fixed comoving volume of…
Life arose on Earth sometime in the first few hundred million years after the young planet had cooled to the point that it could support water-based organisms on its surface. The early emergence of life on Earth has been taken as evidence…
The most well tested and successful model of particle physics is the Standard Model (SM). It is shown here that the restoration of the full SM symmetry (as in the Early Universe) leads to the result that the electric charge loses all…
This note presents a minimal approach to the origin of life, following standard ideas. We pay special attention to the point of view of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, and in particular to detailed balance. As a consequence we…
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…
The existence of multiple regions of space beyond the observable Universe (within the so-called "multiverse") where the vacuum energy density takes different values, has been postulated as an explanation for the low non-zero value observed…