Azbel Phenomenology and Simple Simulations

Abstract

Even an author who complains about the age of her coauthors is likely to reach their age; and finally we will all die. Death is unavoidable also for animals and plants as well as bacteria (provided we define the splitting of a bacterial cell into two cells as the death of the parent cell). And most Olympic records are held by athletes younger than the present authors. Thus physical fitness (as opposed to scientific wisdom) decreases with age during human adulthood, while the probability q to die within the next year increases. For computer simulations, the latter effect, the increase of mortality q with age a, is particularly suitable to define ageing, compared e.g. to studies of beauty.