Month: September 2022

ENERGY CAPTURE. "From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn

FORMULA OF LIFE. "The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn

OPEN SYSTEMS. "Although entropy must increase over time in an isolated or “closed” system, an “open” system can keep its entropy low — that is, divide energy unevenly among its atoms — by greatly increasing the entropy of its surroundings. In his influential 1944 monograph “What Is Life?” the eminent quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger argued that this is what living things must do." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn

HEATING BATHS. "Life does not violate the second law of thermodynamics, but until recently, physicists were unable to use thermodynamics to explain why it should arise in the first place. The systems are strongly driven by an external energy source such as an electromagnetic wave, and they can dump heat into a surrounding bath. This class of systems includes all living things." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn

EXTERNAL ENERGY SOURCE. "We can show very simply from the formula that the more likely evolutionary outcomes are going to be the ones that absorbed and dissipated more energy from the environment’s external drives on the way to getting there." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn

CLUMPS IN THE WARMING BATH. "This means clumps of atoms surrounded by a bath at some temperature, like the atmosphere or the ocean, should tend over time to arrange themselves to resonate better and better with the sources of mechanical, electromagnetic or chemical work in their environments." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn

REPRODUCTIVE DISSIPATION. "Self-replication (or reproduction, in biological terms), the process that drives the evolution of life on Earth, is one such mechanism by which a system might dissipate an increasing amount of energy over time....A great way of dissipating more is to make more copies of yourself." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn

MINIMAL LEAKING. "The theoretical minimum amount of dissipation that can occur during the self-replication of RNA molecules and bacterial cells, and showed that it is very close to the actual amounts these systems dissipate when replicating." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn

RNA WORLD. "He also showed that RNA, the nucleic acid that many scientists believe served as the precursor to DNA-based life, is a particularly cheap building material. Once RNA arose, he argues, its “Darwinian takeover” was perhaps not surprising." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn

LIFE DRIVER. "According to England’s theory, the underlying principle driving the whole process is dissipation-driven adaptation of matter." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn