Related papers: Metastability of life
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…
Some properties of the world are fixed by physics derived from mathematical symmetries, while others are selected from an ensemble of possibilities. Several successes and failures of ``anthropic'' reasoning in this context are reviewed in…
We employ the law of increasing entropy and the assumption about the decrease of the ground state energy to answer the question what are the reasons of the Big Bang and the origin of the Universe.
The two primary causal dimensions of age-related disease are rate and function. Change in rate of disease development shifts the age of onset. Change in physiological function provides necessary steps in disease progression. A causal factor…
A geometrical analysis of the stability of nuclei against deformations is presented. In particular, we use Catastrophe Theory to illustrate discontinuous changes in the behavior of nuclei with respect to deformations as one moves in the N -…
Although species longevity is subject to a diverse range of selective forces, the mortality curves of a wide variety of organisms are rather similar. We argue that aging and its universal characteristics may have evolved by means of a…
Active matter describes systems whose constituents convert energy from their surroundings into directed motion, such as bacteria or catalytic colloids. We establish a thermodynamic law for dilute suspensions of interacting active particles…
The contradiction of micro-reversibility and macro-irreversibility is an old problem in statistical mechanics. This article argues that irreversibility is present even at the micro level because of the mechanical-electromagnetic…
The search for universal laws that help establish a relationship between dynamics and computation is driven by recent expansionist initiatives in biologically inspired computing. A general setting to understand both such dynamics and…
The evolutionary origins of ageing and age-associated diseases continue to pose a fundamental question in biology. This study is concerned with a recently proposed framework, which conceptualises development and ageing as a continuous…
A system of a metastable phase with several sorts of the heterogeneous centers is considered. An analytical theory for the process of decay in such a system has been constructed. The free energy of formation of the critical embryo is…
How multicellular life forms evolved out from unicellular ones constitutes a major problem in our understanding of the evolution of our biosphere. A recent set of experiments involving yeast cell populations has shown that selection for…
In nematodes, environmental or physiological perturbations alter death's scaling of time. In human cancer, genetic perturbations alter death's curvature of time. Those changes in scale and curvature follow the constraining contours of…
We study the effect of metastable states on the relaxation process (and hence information propagation) in locally coupled and boundary-driven structures. We first give a general argument to show that metastable states are inevitable even in…
The random first order transition theory of the dynamics of supercooled liquids is extended to treat aging phenomena in nonequilibrium structural glasses. A reformulation of the idea of ``entropic droplets'' in terms of libraries of local…
Biological macromolecules, proteins and nucleic acids are composed exclusively of chirally pure monomers. The chirality consensus appears vital for life and it has even been considered as a prerequisite of life. However the primary cause…
The decay rate for a particle in a metastable cubic potential is investigated in the quantum regime by the Euclidean path integral method in semiclassical approximation. The imaginary time formalism allows one to monitor the system as a…
We propose a stochastic model for evolution. Births and deaths of species occur with constant probabilities. Each new species is associated with a fitness sampled from the uniform distribution on [0,1]. Every time there is a death event…
The principle of linearized stability and instability is established for a classical model describing the spatial movement of an age-structured population with nonlinear vital rates. It is shown that the real parts of the eigenvalues of the…
Statistical thermodynamics is valuable as a conceptual structure that shapes our thinking about equilibrium thermodynamic states. A cloud of unresolved questions surrounding the foundations of the theory could lead an impartial observer to…