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Does New Physics Lurk inside Living Matter?

Introduction

  • Living Systems are, perhaps, some of the most complex systems in the universe. Even the simplest living system is more complex and powerful than most human engineered systems.
  • Examples of incredible feats: Morphogenesis, Wound healing
  • Biology, the field tasked with the study os such systems, rarely takes a holistic, systems level study of living systems. The field does not yet have something akin to fundamental equations of physics. Few efforts in this direction.
  • Do living systems have universal/fundamental laws? Do we have foundational rules governing the function of living systems?

Why You and I Should Care

  • Rational control of living systems - such powerful technology. [Raised By Wolves, The Expanse].
  • Regeneration, System Level Diseases
  • Substrate for Programmable Matter

Main Points

  • Difference between what life is, what life does (and how it does it), and why life does what it does.
  • Is known physics sufficient to explain what life is?
  • The point of the paper, briefly, is that, no, known physics is not sufficient. There exists some yet to be uncovered rules governing the function of living systems.
  • This new physics will be found at the intersection of Information and Biological Systems. Information storage, flow/transmission, and processing in biological systems
  • Life = Matter + Information

My Synthesis & Questions

  • Can we use insights gained from the study of other evolved systems, such as natural language, to better model biological systems? In particular, we know language to be both compositional and statistical. Can the same be said of biological systems?

Primary Sources

  1. Does New Physics Lurk inside Living Matter?, Paul Davies, Physics Today, 2020