They were written by Stephen Alexander and Salvador Almagro- Moreno.
Is physics capable of explaining biology?
Billion photos.
There is an extract from our newsletter. Each month, we give the keyboard to a physicist or two to give you a glimpse into their world. The Lost in Space-Time can be signed up here.
When the universe exploded into existence with the big bang, it kicked off a chain of events that eventually led to the planets, stars and galaxies we see today. We often see life and the creation of the universe as separate, or non-overlapping magisteria, as a result of this chain of events.
Complex systems like life don't seem to have much effect on the problems they are trying to solve. Life is housed in a biosphere that is not related to the grand scheme of things. Is that correct.
Scientists like John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, and Roger Penrose have entertained the idea of looking at life and the universe in the same way.
His audacious speculations and predictions in biology have been very influential. He gave a series of lectures at Trinity College Dublin in 1943 that would eventually be published in a book called What Is Life? He speculated on how physics and chemistry could work together to explain how life begins.
The metabolism of a living cell must be accounted for by the laws of physics that describe a star. He tried to use the physics he knew to explain biology even though he knew that the physics of his time wasn't up to date.
He said that quantum mechanics is needed to make atoms stable and allow them to bond in the molecule found in matter. For non- living matter, such as in metal, quantum mechanics allows molecule to organize in interesting ways. He believed that periodicity was too easy for life. The entire pattern of the individual's future development and of its functioning in the mature state should be given rise to by this type of non-repetitivemolecular structure. He was looking at an early description of the genetic material.
The idea of the gene was just a unit of inheritance before Schrdinger came along. It feels like common sense to say that genes are governed by a code that programs the structure and mechanisms of cells. Biologists are teasing out how this is accomplished at amolecular level.
Schrdinger used quantum mechanics to come up with his hypothesis. He brought a new approach to biology because he was an outsider.
Since Schrdinger's day, physics and biology have evolved. What if we did the same thing and asked what is life like today?
The authors of this newsletter have a pattern. Sometimes over a drink, we meet up to exchange ideas and discuss the current state of science. We like to stay up late talking while listening to our favorite music. Our conversations are intended to benefit each other's research by generating an outsider perspective. It is also very enjoyable.
We have developed an intuition that there is a hidden interdependence between living systems and the universe. In order to understand this, we need to talk about how it flows in the universe and how it is measured.
There was an equal amount of radiation and matter in the early universe. The mixture became less ordered as it warmed. As the universe expanded, it distributed radiation and matter in a fashion that lowered the entropy of the universe.
Stars, galaxies, and life formed as the universe expanded. The second law states that the structures have more order than the rest of the universe. It is possible for the universe to get away with this because the lower parts of the universe are concentrated in the Cosmic structures.
The main currency for the biosphere is the network of structures. Ludwig Boltzmann, the father of thermodynamics, said that the struggle for existence of animate beings is not a struggle for raw materials but a struggle for entropy.
By seeding and forming lower entropy structures, the universe continues to grow. Within those structures, entropy grows. A lifeless universe with low entropy is necessary for life on Earth because it is a key player in sustaining Cosmic structures such as stars and life. Plants on Earth absorb the sun's energy and use it in their functions. Plants give back more energy to the universe than they take in.
It's hard to understand why the early universe had so little entropy. One of the major problems with this theory is the issue of low entropy.
The biology side of the story is based on the genetic and ecological drivers that lead harmlessbacteria to evolve and become pathogens. It isn't just a question of the genetic code of thebacteria Life is an adaptive phenomenon that responds to changes in the environment.
The final shape of an organisms isn't contained in the individual pieces that make it up but can be influenced by a series of larger systems to which it belongs. There is a network of interactions that occur in the environment. Billions of cells are regulated by a living system to keep its functioning. Collections of organisms are part of a network called an ecosystems.
This goes all the way to networks at large scales. James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis discovered the idea of Earth being a self-regulating system in the 70's. The flow of negative entropy is not only for individual living things, but for the whole Earth.
The sun sends free energy to Earth, and through a chain of complex interactions, the energy gets distributed through a network of interactions to living things. We define these structures as Units of Negentropy, or UONs, in order to contextualise the role of life in the framework of thermodynamics. There isn't a free lunch. When UONs release this energy back into the environment, they usually do so in a way that has higher entropy than was received.
It may seem like a coincidence, but we don't think of it that way. We propose that it is a principle of the evolution of the universe. The anthropic principle states that the universe is fine-tuned for life. Nature's laws seem to be the right ones for life. If the strength of the nuclear force that bonds the hearts of atoms was different, stars wouldn't be able to produce carbon and there wouldn't be life.
The problem may not be as bad as it appears. The universe can be fit for life if the constants of nature like gravity and electromagnetism don't change at the same time. Maybe the anthropic principle isn't needed anymore. It is more difficult to shake the entropocentric principle. Life as we know it wouldn't exist if the universe wasn't able to give pathways that allowed it to create regions of lower entropy. We are wondering if the universe is a Cosmic Cell or not.
A theoretical physicist at Brown University in Rhode Island, he spends his time thinking about string theory and jazz and wondering if the universe is a self- learning artificial intelligence. Fear of a Black Universe was written by him. The University of Central Florida has a faculty member who studies the properties of biological systems.
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