Related papers: Life as Non-Normal Chemical Accelerator
Although it has been notoriously difficult to pin down precisely what it is that makes life so distinctive and remarkable, there is general agreement that its informational aspect is one key property, perhaps the key property. The unique…
A universal framework is proposed, where all laws are regularities of relations between things or agents. Parts of the world at one or all times are modeled as networks called SYSTEMS with a minimum of axiomatic properties. A notion of…
The question "What is life?" has been asked and studied by the researchers of various fields. Nevertheless, no global theory which unified various aspects of life has been proposed so far. Considering that the physical principle for the…
Self-organization creates new order and shifts sub-boundaries while reorganizing energy and entropy within a control volume. This article examines pathway selection and tests whether maximizing the entropy generation rate can forecast…
Basic problems in complex systems are surveyed in connection with Life. As a key issue for complex systems, complementarity between syntax/rule/parts and semantics/behavior/whole is stressed. To address the issue, a constructive approach…
In genuine nonequilibrium systems that undergo continuous driving, the thermodynamic forces are nonconservative, meaning they cannot be described by any free energy potential. Nonetheless, we show that the dynamics of such systems are…
Evolution is the fundamental physical process that gives rise to biological phenomena. Yet it is widely treated as a subset of population genetics, and thus its scope is artificially limited. As a result, the key issues of how rapidly…
Instances of critical-like characteristics in living systems at each organizational level as well as the spontaneous emergence of computation (Langton), indicate the relevance of self-organized criticality (SOC). But extrapolating complex…
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,…
The metabolism is the motor behind the biological complexity of an organism. One problem of characterizing its large-scale structure is that it is hard to know what to compare it to. All chemical reaction systems are shaped by the same…
Living systems are open nonequilibrium systems that continuously exchange energy, matter, and information with their environments, leading to stochastic dynamics with memory and active fluctuations. In this study, we develop a non-Markovian…
Living systems efficiently use chemical fuel to do work, process information, and assemble patterns despite thermal noise. Whether high efficiency arises from general principles or specific fine-tuning is unknown. Here, applying a recent…
Most natural thermodynamic systems operate far from equilibrium, developing persistent currents and organizing into non-equilibrium stationary states (NESSs). Yet, the principles by which such systems self-organize, breaking equilibrium…
Living systems operate out of equilibrium, continuously consuming energy to sustain organised, functional states. Their emergent behaviour usually relies on a set of interconnected chemical reaction networks (CRNs) driven by external fluxes…
The principle of entropy increase is not only the basis of statistical mechanics, but also closely related to the irreversibility of time, the origin of life, chaos and turbulence. In this paper, we first discuss the dynamic system…
The excess work required to drive a stochastic system out of thermodynamic equilibrium through a time-dependent external perturbation is directly related to the amount of entropy produced during the driving process, allowing excess work and…
Equilibrium self-assembly and conventional materials processing techniques fall far short of mimicking dynamic self-actuating processes that are commonplace throughout biology. To bridge the gap between living and synthetic matter, we study…
Why can the world resist the law of entropy increase and produce self-organizing structure? Does the entropy of an isolated system always only increase and never decrease? Can be thermodymamic degradation and self-organizing evolution…
Life uses non-equilibrium mechanisms to create ordered structures not attainable at equilibrium; the resulting order is assumed to provide functional benefits that outweigh costs of time and energy needed by these mechanisms. Here, we show…
Explaining the origin of life requires us to explain how self-replication arises. To be specific, how can a self-replicating entity develop spontaneously from a chemical reaction system in which no reaction is self-replicating? Previously…