相关论文: On the statistical mechanics of life: Schr\"odinge…

The emergence of life from inanimate matter presents a thermodynamic challenge: the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates a global trend towards disorder, yet life constitutes localized pockets of profound organization. This paper presents…

We argue for a convergence of crystallography, materials science and biology, that will come about through asking materials questions about biology and biological questions about materials, illuminated by considerations of information. The…

Biological systems are typically highly open, non-equilibrium systems that are very challenging to understand from a statistical mechanics perspective. While statistical treatments of evolutionary biological systems have a long and rich…

There are many natural, physical, and biological systems that exhibit multiple time scales. For example, the dynamics of a population of ticks can be described in continuous time during their individual life cycle yet discrete time is used…

Statistical laws describe regular patterns observed in diverse scientific domains, ranging from the magnitude of earthquakes (Gutenberg-Richter law) and metabolic rates in organisms (Kleiber's law), to the frequency distribution of words in…

A general formulation of stochastic thermodynamics is presented for open systems exchanging energy and particles with multiple reservoirs. By introducing a partition in terms of "macrostates" (e.g. sets of "microstates"), the consequence on…

We test Boltzmann's H-theorem for several models of particle random walk. We study the influence of interaction between the particle and reservoir/detectors on entropy and find entropy increasing in time for some models and behaving…

Spatial distribution of the human population is distinctly heterogeneous, e.g. showing significant difference in the population density between urban and rural areas. In the historical perspective, i.e. on the timescale of centuries, the…

From a purely operational standpoint, the existence of microbes that can grow under extreme conditions, or "extremophiles", leads to the question of how the molecules making up these microbes can maintain both their structure and function.…

According to statistical mechanics, micro-states of an isolated physical system (say, a gas in a box) at time $t_0$ in a given macro-state of less-than-maximal entropy typically evolve in such a way that the entropy at time $t$ increases…

Many processes in nature seem to be entirely controlled by transition rates and the corresponding statistical dynamics. Some of them are in essence quantum, like the decay of excited states, the tunneling through barriers or the decay of…

With the use of the general variational principle of self-organization of systems with varying constraints, namely the principle of dynamical harmonization of systems presented in the first work of the cycle, we advance an approach to the…

A definition of the thermodynamic entropy based on the time-dependent probability distribution of the macroscopic variables is developed. When a constraint in a composite system is released, the probability distribution for the new…

It is probably not a coincidence that two of the pioneers of thermodynamics, Helmholtz and Mayer, were physicians. Thermodynamics studies the transformations of energy, and such transformations ceaselessly take place in all living systems…

We introduce an ambidextrous view of stochastic dynamical systems, comparing their forward-time and reverse-time representations and then integrating them into a single time-symmetric representation. The perspective is useful theoretically,…

We consider the scaling laws, second-order statistics and entropy of the consumed energy of metropolis cities which are hybrid complex systems comprising social networks, engineering systems, agricultural output, economic activity and…

Extremal principles are fundamental in our interpretation of phenomena in nature. One of the best known examples is the second law of thermodynamics, governing most physical and chemical systems and stating the continuous increase of…

Many systems in chemistry, biology, finance and social sciences present emerging features which are not easy to guess from the elementary interactions of their microscopic individual components. In the past, the macroscopic behavior of such…

With a view to connecting random mutation on the molecular level to punctuated equilibrium behavior on the phenotype level, we propose a new model for biological evolution, which incorporates random mutation and natural selection. In this…

A major part of the many thermally driven processes in our natural environment as well as in engineering solutions of Carnot-type machinery is based on the second law of thermodynamics (or principle of entropy increase). An interesting link…