Related papers: Mathematical Physics and Life
One of the important challenges facing high resolution molecular dynamics calculations is to reproduce biological functions that occur in the macroscopic world and involve macroscopic variables. Some of these functions can be well described…
The purpose of this essay is to bring out the unique role of Mathematics in providing a base to the diverse sciences which conform to its rigid structure. Of these the physical and economic sciences are so intimately linked with…
Our understanding of the physics of biological molecules, such as proteins and DNA, is limited because the approximations we usually apply to model inert materials are not in general applicable to soft, chemically inhomogeneous systems. The…
Replication of DNA and synthesis of proteins are studied from the view-point of quantum database search. Identification of a base-pairing with a quantum query gives a natural (and first ever) explanation of why living organisms have 4…
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…
Stapp and others have proposed that reality involves a fundamental life process, or creative process. It is shown how this process description may be unified with the description that derives from quantum physics. The methods of the quantum…
Statistical mechanics is one of the most powerful and elegant tools in the quantitative sciences. One key virtue of statistical mechanics is that it is designed to examine large systems with many interacting degrees of freedom, providing a…
Several concrete examples in quantum information are discussed to demonstrate the importance of proper modeling that relates the mathematical description to real-world applications. In particular, it is shown that some commonly accepted…
At its core, the physics paradigm adopts a reductionist approach, aiming to understand fundamental phenomena by decomposing them into simpler, elementary processes. While this strategy has been tremendously successful in physics, it has…
Many recent results suggest that quantum theory is about information, and that quantum theory is best understood as arising from principles concerning information and information processing. At the same time, by far the simplest version of…
The internal dynamics of strongly interacting systems and that of biomolecules such as proteins display several important analogies, despite the huge difference in their characteristic energy and length scales. For example, in all such…
Though the truths of logic and pure mathematics are objective and independent of any contingent facts or laws of nature, our knowledge of these truths depends entirely on our knowledge of the laws of physics. Recent progress in the quantum…
This article frames the relation between biology and physics by characterizing the former as a subdiscipline rather than a special case of the latter. To do this, we posit biological physics as the science of living matter in contrast to…
This paper discusses the benefits of describing the world as information, especially in the study of the evolution of life and cognition. Traditional studies encounter problems because it is difficult to describe life and cognition in terms…
Both metamathematics and physics are posited to emerge from samplings by observers of the unique ruliad structure that corresponds to the entangled limit of all possible computations. The possibility of higher-level mathematics accessible…
The biological cell exhibits a fantastic range of behaviors, but ultimately these are governed by a handful of physical and chemical principles. Here we explore simple theory, known for decades and based on the simple thermodynamics of…
As a result of a hundred million years of evolution, living animals have adapted extremely well to their ecological niche. Such adaptation implies species-specific interactions with their immediate environment by processing sensory cues and…
The University of Maryland (UMD) Biology Education and Physics Education Research Groups are investigating students' views on the role of physics in introductory biology courses. This paper presents data from an introductory course that…
This paper deals with the foundations of quantum mechanics. We start by outlining the characterisation, due to Birkhoff and Von Neumann, of the logical structures of the theories of classical physics and quantum mechanics, as boolean and…
Molecular dynamics (MD) has become a powerful tool for studying biophysical systems, due to increasing computational power and availability of software. Although MD has made many contributions to better understanding these complex…