相关论文: Life thrives on abundance (quantum included)

The discovery of accelerating expansion of the universe has led us to take the dramatic view that our universe may be one of the many universes in which low energy physical laws take different forms: the multiverse. I explain why/how this…

It has recently been shown that small quantum subsystems generically equilibrate, in the sense that they spend most of the time close to a fixed equilibrium state. This relies on just two assumptions: that the state is spread over many…

Experimental evidene of the last decades has made the status of "collapses of the wave function" even more shaky than it already was on conceptual grounds: interference effects turn out to be detectable even when collapses are typically…

A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…

A basic linearity of quantum dynamics, that density matrices are mapped linearly to density matrices, is proved very simply for a system that does not interact with anything else. It is assumed that at each time the physical quantities and…

Motivated by the wide range of known self-replicating systems, some far from genetics, we study a system composed by individuals having an internal dynamics with many possible states that are partially stable, with varying mutation rates.…

Complex systems throughout Nature display structures and functions that are built and maintained, at least in part, by optimal energies flowing through them--not specific, ideal values, rather ranges in energy rate density below which…

I examine some recent findings in cosmology and their potential implications for the emergence of life in the universe. In particular, I discuss the requirements for carbon-based life, anthropic considerations with respect to the nature of…

It seems natural to ask why the universe exists at all. Modern physics suggests that the universe can exist all by itself as a self-contained system, without anything external to create or sustain it. But there might not be an absolute…

We show that the quantum computational speedup of quantum algorithms is due to their teleological character, their being evolutions toward a goal (the solution of the problem) with an attractor in the very goal they will produce in the…

When a physicist says that a theory is fine-tuned, they mean that it must make a suspiciously precise assumption in order to explain a certain observation. This is evidence that the theory is deficient or incomplete. One particular case of…

I argue that scientific determinism is not supported by facts, but results from the elegance of the mathematical language physicists use, in particular from the so-called real numbers and their infinite series of digits. Classical physics…

We consider systems whose lifetime is measured by the time of physical degradation of components, as well as the degree of power each component contributes to the system. The lifetimes of the components of the system are random variables.…

It is often claimed that the fundamental laws of physics are deterministic and time-symmetric and that therefore our experience of the passage of time is an illusion. This paper will critically discuss these claims and show that they are…

Although both systems analyzed are described through two theories apparently different (quantum mechanics and game theory) it is shown that both are analogous and thus exactly equivalents. The quantum analogue of the replicator dynamics is…

The irreversibility in a statistical system is traced to its probabilistic evolution, and the molecular chaos assumption is not its unique consequence as is commonly believed. Under the assumption that the rate of change of the each…

According to quantum theory, randomness is a fundamental property of the universe yet classical physics is mostly deterministic. In this article I show that it is possible for deterministic systems to arise from random ones and discuss the…

A macroscopic quantum state that is characterized by an energy gap in the electronic spectrum and occurs in organic structural components of the cell is hypothesized to provide a basis for the phenomenon of life. The width of the band gap…

Despite their simplicity, quantum harmonic oscillators are ubiquitous in the modeling of physical systems. They are able to capture universal properties that serve as reference for the more complex systems found in nature. In this spirit,…

We argue using simple models that all successful practical uses of probabilities originate in quantum fluctuations in the microscopic physical world around us, often propagated to macroscopic scales. Thus we claim there is no physically…