Month: September 2022

DRIVER OF TRANSITION. "This principle would apply to inanimate matter as well...It is very tempting to speculate about what phenomena in nature we can now fit under this big tent of dissipation-driven adaptive organization." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn

NON-LIVING LEAKING. "Scientists have already observed self-replication in nonliving systems. According to new research led by Philip Marcus of the University of California, Berkeley, and reported in Physical Review Letters in August, vortices in turbulent fluids spontaneously replicate themselves by drawing energy from shear in the surrounding fluid." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn

MORE INANIMATE LEAKS. "Michael Brenner, a professor of applied mathematics and physics at Harvard, and his collaborators present theoretical models and simulations of microstructures that self-replicate. These clusters of specially coated microspheres dissipate energy by roping nearby spheres into forming identical clusters." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn

COMPLEXIFICATION. "Besides self-replication, greater structural organization is another means by which strongly driven systems ramp up their ability to dissipate energy. A plant, for example, is much better at capturing and routing solar energy through itself than an unstructured heap of carbon atoms." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn

INANIMATE SELF-ORGANIZATION. "Under certain conditions, matter will spontaneously self-organize. This tendency could account for the internal order of living things and of many inanimate structures as well." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn

DISSIPATION AND ORGANIZATION. "Snowflakes, sand dunes and turbulent vortices all have in common that they are strikingly patterned structures that emerge in many-particle systems driven by some dissipative process...Condensation, wind and viscous drag are the relevant processes in these particular cases." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn

THE GREY ZONE. "The distinction between living and nonliving matter is not sharp." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn

AVOIDING NATURAL SELECTION. "Natural selection doesn’t explain certain characteristics...These characteristics include a heritable change to gene expression called methylation, increases in complexity in the absence of natural selection, and certain molecular changes." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn

SELECTION VS EASIER PATH. They might find, for example, that “the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve." https://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/ View in LinkedIn

SLY CATCH. "No one knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage." https://lnkd.in/dg_EX4d View in LinkedIn