Related papers: Metastability of life
What is information, physically, and why does it so reliably emerge in living, cultural, and technological systems? Existing theories quantify uncertainty, cost, or compressibility, but do not identify which physical structures count as…
A variety of physical unknowables are discussed. Provable lack of physical omniscience, omnipredictability and omnipotence is derived by reduction to problems which are known to be recursively unsolvable. "Chaotic" symbolic dynamical…
Recent theoretical progress in nonequilibrium thermodynamics, linking the physical principle of Maximum Entropy Production ("MEP") to the information-theoretical "MaxEnt" principle of scientific inference, together with conjectures from…
A simple and effective approach to thermodynamics is suggested, which solves the major difficulties in the traditional presentation of the subject. The internal energy is introduced from the behavior of deformable bodies, whereas the…
Biological evolution continuously refines the design of species, resulting in highly optimised organisms over hundreds of millennia. Intuitively, we expect that random changes-evolution's primary mechanism-are more likely to be harmful than…
A tradition handed down among physicists maintains that classical physics is a perfectly deterministic theory capable of predicting the future with absolute certainty, independently of any interpretations. It also tells that it was quantum…
Metastability, characterized by a variability of regimes in time, is a ubiquitous type of neural dynamics. It has been formulated in many different ways in the neuroscience literature, however, which may cause some confusion. In this…
Infant deaths and old age deaths are very different. The former are mostly due to severe congenital malformations of one or a small number of specific organs. On the contrary, old age deaths are largely the outcome of a long process of…
The quest for life in the Universe is often affected by the free use of extrapolations of our phenomenological geocentric knowledge. We point out that the existence of a living organism, and a population of organisms, requires the existence…
Biology has taken strong steps towards becoming a computer science aiming at reprogramming nature after the realisation that nature herself has reprogrammed organisms by harnessing the power of natural selection and the digital prescriptive…
When liquids are cooled sufficiently rapidly below their melting temperature, they may bypass crystalization and, instead, enter a long-lived metastable supercooled state that has long been the focus of intense research. Although they…
The basic laws of physics are simple, so why is the world complex? The theory of self-organized criticality posits that complex behavior in nature emerges from the dynamics of extended, dissipative systems that evolve through a sequence of…
A non-statistical theory of continuous, but irreversible, evolution can be constructed in terms of the Cartan calculus. The fundamental postulate, for an evolutionary theory which admits irreversible processes, is that the topology of the…
Equilibrium statistical mechanics is intended to link the microscopic dynamics of particles to the thermodynamic laws for macroscopic quantities. However, the modern statistical theory is faced with significant difficulties, as applied to…
Evidently, physical experiments are practically reproducible even though the fully identical preparation of initial state wave functions is often far beyond experimental possibilities. It is thus natural to explore if and in which sense…
The concept of random deaths in a computational model for population dynamics is critically examined. We claim that it is just an artifact, albeit useful, of computational models to limit the size of the populations and has no biological…
Herein we consider various concepts of entropy as measures of the complexity of phenomena and in so doing encounter a fundamental problem in physics that affects how we understand the nature of reality. In essence the difficulty has to do…
We finely describe the "coming down from infinity" for birth and death processes which eventually become extinct. Our biological motivation is to study the decrease of regulated populations which are initially large. Under general…
Molecular Dynamics and Statistical Mechanics make possible a particle-based understanding of Thermodynamics and Hydrodynamics, including the fascinating Loschmidt contradiction between time-reversible atomistic mechanics and the…
By introducing the notions of living and dead nodes a new model of random tree evolution with continuous time parameter has been constructed. It is assumed that two random variables, the lifetime and the offspring number of living nodes…