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What is life?

M Anbar1

  • 1State University of New York at Buffalo, USA.

IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine : the Quarterly Magazine of the Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society
|July 12, 2001
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Life is a fundamental natural process, as significant as physics, but far less predictable due to its complexity. Living systems can influence the universe, unlike inanimate matter governed by fixed laws.

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Area of Science:

  • Life sciences
  • Physics
  • Complexity science

Background:

  • Life is a fundamental natural process comparable to physical laws governing the inanimate world.
  • Living systems exhibit emergent complexity, particularly with social organization, altering their behavior significantly.
  • Unlike the predictable inanimate universe, life possesses the capacity to influence cosmic trajectories.

Discussion:

  • The behavior of living systems is inherently unpredictable, defying conventional modeling due to immense complexity.
  • Predicting life's trajectory is challenging, as even vast historical data cannot forecast future states like human civilization.
  • Unpredictability stems from interactions among millions of stochastic processes, creating virtually infinite behavioral pathways.

Key Insights:

Related Experiment Videos

  • Life's complexity surpasses that of inanimate systems, making it fundamentally different from phenomena modeled by statistical mechanics.
  • Living systems are not bound by an uncertainty principle analogous to Heisenberg's in quantum mechanics.
  • Life is a multifunctional process fundamental to nature, capable of controlling universal behavior and lifespan.

    • Outlook:

    • Further research into the fundamental nature of life and its interaction with physical laws is warranted.
    • Understanding life's unpredictability may require novel theoretical frameworks beyond current physics.
    • The study of life's influence on the universe opens new avenues in astrobiology and cosmology.