A New Physics Theory of Life
Date: Sunday, December 14, 2014 @ 02:51:13 GMT
Topic: Science
 Art Hunter writes: While reading this link, it had Cold fusion stamped all over it. What do you think?
From QuataMagazine.org: By:
Natalie Wolchover/ January 22, 2014
Jeremy England, a 31-year-old physicist at MIT, thinks he has found the underlying physics driving the origin and evolution of life.
Why 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...
Full article: http://www.quantamagazine.org/20140122-a-new-physics-theory-of-life/#ixzz3LY1HXGy5
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