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THE OUTLIERS. “The menagerie of microbiology also includes artificially simplified versions of natural organisms, specific RNA viral particles or viroids, viral agents named satellites, viruses of viruses that go by the name of virophages, autonomous DNA strands or plasmids, prions, and still others.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn

OUTLIERS. These “hard-to-classify entities” include smart macromolecules, complex chemical networks, spontaneous crystals, large viruses, streamlined bacteria. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn

IGNORING THE DETAILS. “Yet, numerous hard-to-classify entities are now known that challenge our very intuitions about life and non-life.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn

THE HARD TO CLASSIFY. “From spontaneously self-reorganizing crystals to mega-viruses to drastically reduced micro-endosymbionts, all these microscopic entities that we mentioned in the introduction constitute a set of entities that are hard to categorize as either truly living or truly non-living.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn

DEFINITION OF LIFE. “However the real difficulty lays elsewhere: in the surprising diversity of borderline cases—giant viruses, sterile organisms, extreme microsymbionts, etc.—and disputes that follow their categorization as alive or not.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn

DEGREES OF LIFELESSNESS. “Building on these dimensions-related differences, we also computed a single value of overall lifeness for each more-or-less-alive entity, thereby providing an empirically-founded quantification of degrees of lifeness.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn

PROPERTY CLUSTERS. “They also show how different degrees of overall lifeness can be achieved in different ways. This multidimensional way of mapping borderline entities exemplifies the need of reformulating questions of the type “Is X alive?” into questions of the type “What is the lifeness of X?”. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn

ANALYSIS. “We hence defined an 8-dimensional “lifeness space” on the basis of these property clusters and used semantic proximity as a metric for assessing the relative positioning of the target entities along these dimensions. These findings corroborate the intuition that different entities perform differently along each lifeness dimension.” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-019-02356-w View in LinkedIn

UNDERPINNING #2. “The Big Bang Theory is the ultimate explanation of the creation of our Universe. The theory is supported by the standard model which is supported by all recent fundamental discoveries in Particle Physics.” https://lnkd.in/df-X8h2E View in LinkedIn

UNDERPINNING #1. “Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence principle is true. Which means that mass can be fully converted into energy and energy can be fully converted into mass. This fact has found over the years wide experimental proofs.” https://lnkd.in/df-X8h2E View in LinkedIn