Abstract
Life sciences are among the most interesting fields of contemporary scientific research. The biological world has such a wide range of complexities that any attempt to present it in any depth would take us outside the scope of the present book. In the present chapter, we shall thus only refer to a few specific physical problems in the biological world.
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Literature
E. Schrödinger, What is Life? (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1944). An excellent study of the thermodynamics and statistical physics of biological systems. Several topics dealt with here remain valid today
N. Wiener, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (MIT Press, 1948). This was a pioneering book on cybernetics, by one of the creators of the field
G. Nicholis, I. Prigogine, Self Organization in Non-Equilibrium Systems (Wiley, New York, 1977). The thermodynamics of open systems, like biological systems, is very clearly discussed in this book
G. Gamow, W. Brittin, Negative Entropy and Photosynthesis, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 47, 724 (1961). This paper supplies a quantitative argument regarding the role of low entropy sunlight as the mechanism driving the development of biological order
R.P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics. The Definitive Edition, vol. I. (Pearson-Addison Wesley, Reading, Massachusetts, 2006). One of the first references in a physics book to the homochirality problem was made in the first edition of this book, in 1965
J. Chela-Flores, Terrestrial Microbes as Candidates for Survival on Mars and Europa, “Journey to Diverse Microbial Worlds: Adaptation to Exotic Environments” (Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 2000). Contains a very interesting discussion on the topic of exobiology
J.D. Barrow, F.J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Clarendon, Oxford, 1986).In this book a deep and exhaustive analysis is made of the physical and biological basis for the anthropic principle
M. Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex (W. Freeman and Co., New York, 1995). A stimulating and uncommon book, dealing with diverse topics, from elementary particle physics to complex adaptive systems
D. Abbot, P.A.W. Davies, A.K. Pati (eds.), Quantum Aspects of Life (Imperial College Press, London, 2008). This book, with a foreword by Roger Penrose, presents the hotly debated question of whether quantum mechanics plays a non-trivial role in biology
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Chaichian, M., Rojas, H.P., Tureanu, A. (2014). Physics and Life. In: Basic Concepts in Physics. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19598-3_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19598-3_12
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