What is Life? on Superphysics

The Fundamental Difference In Structure

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How can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?

Autobiographical Sketches

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I lived far apart from my best friend, actually the only close friend I ever had, for the greater part of my life. (Maybe that is why I have often been accused of flirtatiousness instead of true friendship.) He studied biology (botany to be exact); I physics. And many a night we would stroll back and forth between Gluckgasse and Schliisselgasse engrossed in philo- sophical conversation. Little did we know then that what seemed original to us had occupied great minds for centuries already. Don’t teachers always do their best to avoid these topics for fear that they might conflict with religious doctrines and cause uncomfortable questions? This is the main reason for my turning against religion, which has never done me any harm.

The Working Of An Organism Requires Exact Physical Laws

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We feel and think and perceive.

Second Example (Brownian Movement, Diffusion)

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Fill the lower part of a closed glass vessel with fog of minute droplets.

The upper boundary of the fog gradually sinks with a speed determined by:

the viscosity of the air
the size of a sinking droplet
the specific gravity of the droplets

Under the microscope, the droplets individually do not permanently sink with constant speed.

The Fundamental Difference In Structure

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

THIRD EXAMPLE (LIMITS OF ACCURACY OF MEASURING)

Suspend a lightweight body by a long thin fibre in equilibrium orientation.

This is often used by physicists to measure weak forces which deflect it from that position.

The Hereditary Mechanism

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The Classical Physicist’S Expectation Is Wrong

An organism and all the biologically relevant processes that it experiences must:

Epilogue

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Determinism and Free Will

The space-time events in a living being which correspond to the activity of its mind, to its self-conscious or any other actions, are statistico-deterministic.

The Classical Physicist's Approach to the Subject

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

THE HEREDITARY CODE-SCRIPT (CHROMOSOMES)

I use ‘pattern’ as ’the four-dimensional pattern’.

meaning not only the structure and functioning of that organism in the adult, or in any other particular stage, but the whole of its ontogenetic development from the fertilized egg cell to the stage of maturity, when the organism begins to reproduce itself.

Reductive Division (Meiosis) And Fertilization (Syngamy)

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Very soon after the development of the individual has set in, a group of cells is reserved for producing at a later stage the so-called gametes, the sperma cells or egg cells, as the case may be, needed for the reproduction of the individual in maturity.

The Outstanding Relevance Of The Reductive Division

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The important, the really fateful event in the process of reproduction of the individual is not fertilization but meiosis.

One set of chromosomes is from the father, one from the mother. Neither chance nor destiny can interfere with that.

Mutations

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‘JUMP-LIKE’ MUTATIONS - THE WORKING-GROUND OF NATURAL SELECTION

The general facts which we have just put forward in evidence of the durability claimed for the gene structure, are perhaps too familiar to us to be striking or to be regarded as convincing.

Localization. Recessivity And Dominance

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

We must now review some other fundamental facts and notions about mutations, again in a slightly dogmatic manner, without showing directly how they spring, one by one, from experimental evidence.

The Classical Physicist's Approach to the Subject

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Harmful Effect Of Close-Breeding

Recessive mutations, as long as they are only heterozygous, are of course no working-ground for natural selection.

If they are detrimental, as mutations very often are, they will never- theless not be eliminated, because they are latent.

2 Laws of Mutation

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Law 1: Mutation Is A Single Event

The laws governing the induced mutation rate are extremely simple.

Law 1: The increase is exactly proportional to the dosage of rays, leading to a coefficient of increase.

We are so used to simple proportionality that we are liable to underrate the far-reaching consequences of this simple law.

The Quantum-Mechanical Evidence

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Permanence Unexplainable By Classical Physics

X-rays revealed 30 years ago the detailed atomic lattice structures of crystals.

Molecules

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Among the discrete set of states of a given selection of atoms there need not necessarily but there may be a lowest level, implying a close approach of the nuclei to each other.

First and Second Amendment

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

First Amendment

In offering these considerations as

My theory of the stability of the molecule assumes that the quantum jump or ’lift’ changes the configuration of the same atoms.

An isomeric molecule is a molecule composed of the same atoms in a different arrangement.

The Quantum-Mechanical Evidence

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

THE GENERAL PICTURE OF THE HEREDITARY SUBSTANCE

Can these structures made of few atoms withstand for long periods the disturbing heat motion to which the hereditary substance is continually exposed?

The Different States of Matter

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In the true aspect of the structure of matter the limits must be drawn in an entirely different way.

The fundamental distinction is between the two lines of the following scheme of ’ equations':

Stability Of Naturally Selected Genes

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Having discovered the increase of the natural mutation rate by any kind of ionizing rays, one might think of attributing the natural rate to the radio-activity of the soil and air and to cosmic radiation. But a quantitative comparison with the X-ray results shows that the ’natural radiation’ is much too weak and could account only for a small fraction of the natural rate.

Order Disorder and Entropy

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A REMARKABLE GENERAL CONCLUSION FROM THE MODEL

The miniature code of the molecular picture of the gene should be in one-to-one correspondence with a highly complicated and specified plan of development.

Stability Of Naturally Selected Genes

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of ’equilibrium’ that an organism appears so enigmatic; so much so, that from the earliest times of human thought some special non-physical or supernatural force (vis viva, entelechy) was claimed to be operative in the organism, and in some quarters is still claimed.

Is Life Based on the Laws of Physics?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

New Laws in the Organism

The structure of living matter is not based on the ordinary laws of physics.

The Order-to-Order Principle

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Two Ways Of Producing Orderliness

The orderliness encountered in the unfolding of life springs from a different source.

There are 2 different ‘mechanisms’ that produce orderly events:

The ‘statistical mechanism’

This produces ‘order from disorder’

Clockwork After All Statistical

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The ‘simple’ case we have analysed is representative of many others - in fact of all such as appear to evade the all-embracing principle of molecular statistics.

Clockworks made of real physical matter (in con- trast to imagination) are not true ‘clock-works’. The element of chance may be more or less reduced, the likelihood of the clock suddenly going altogether wrong may be infinitesimal, but it always remains in the background. Even in the motion of the celestial bodies irreversible frictional and thermal influences are not wanting. Thus the rotation of the earth is slowly diminished by tidal friction, and along with this reduction the moon gradually recedes from the earth, which. would not happen if the earth were a completely rigid rotating sphere.