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A New Physics Theory of Life

Started by stromboli, January 22, 2014, 09:38:39 PM

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stromboli

https://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta ... y-of-life/

QuoteWhy does life exist?

Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and "should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill."

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. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. 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.

"You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant," England said.

England's theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. "I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong," he explained. "On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon."

His idea, detailed in a recent paper and further elaborated in a talk he is delivering at universities around the world, has sparked controversy among his colleagues, who see it as either tenuous or a potential breakthrough, or both.

England has taken "a very brave and very important step," said Alexander Grosberg, a professor of physics at New York University who has followed England's work since its early stages. The "big hope" is that he has identified the underlying physical principle driving the origin and evolution of life, Grosberg said.

"Jeremy is just about the brightest young scientist I ever came across," said Attila Szabo, a biophysicist in the Laboratory of Chemical Physics at the National Institutes of Health who corresponded with England about his theory after meeting him at a conference. "I was struck by the originality of the ideas."

This is certainly controversial. I know this because about 6 months after I started posting here I proposed something like this without any supporting argument and was roundly lambasted. The reason I agree with this is because life is so tenacious. We have found life in every conceivable hostile environment, from frozen wastes to Sulphur pits to wherever you can think of, because even with random chance, there is an inevitability that sooner or later the right combinations of light, chemistry and heat will eventually cause something to happen. This, along with the thread about water found in stardust, leads me to believe in it being possible.

Jason78

It's sounds like a great idea, lets hope it pans out.
Winner of WitchSabrinas Best Advice Award 2012


We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real
tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. -Plato

barbarian

Snottites are colonies of single-celled extremophilic bacteria. If you really want to look into life within other planetary systems that these snottites or something similar could exist easily.

QuoteThe intense investigation of caves as microbial habitats is a fairly recent event. While the biofilms they create have always been evident and enthralling, their exact composition was, until recently, generally unknown. The dangerous atmospheric conditions don't make these environments ideal for long term exposure, but safety measures could enable intense and rewarding data. These microbial species are obviously vital to the sulfur cycling and cave formation processes. Fortunately, there are a variety of caves that exhibit the expansion process in various stages, enabling scientists to see the long term effects.

These cave systems, while harsh in their conditions, are relatively constant compared to other environments since the deeper parts are considerably isolated from the outside world. Northup and Lavoie (2001) 8 state, "Caves should be used as experimental study systems for geomicrobiology, not because they are strange, but because they are simple and often locally abundant, allowing for replicate studies." Scientists have already used caves as incubators to grow certain species found in these environments so as to run replicate tests on the cultures. Further investigations are necessary to identify the exact species involved in the formations as well as the extent to which the microorganisms participate in cave expansion.

http://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Snottites

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/sol ... slime.html