Alive or Not Alive: Entropy and Living Things

Dear Colleagues,

Every living thing is a highly specific and complex system, far from thermodynamic equilibrium, characterized by strong self-adaptation and entropy dissipation. Understanding these properties is crucial for distinguishing living organisms from non-living systems, such as tornadoes or snowflakes. While biology and medicine have long been at the forefront of exploring the mysteries of life, physics also offers valuable tools and perspectives that can contribute to unraveling these fundamental questions.

For many years, physicists have been developing the field of stochastic thermodynamics, which provides a deeper understanding of the physical principles governing life. This rapidly evolving discipline sheds new light on how organisms generate and regulate their entropy, how self-adaptation functions, why certain external stressors can have beneficial effects, and even how life might have emerged in the first place. By applying concepts from nonequilibrium physics, researchers are gradually piecing together a coherent framework that connects fundamental physical laws with biological processes.

Although the mathematical formalism used in these studies can be conceptually challenging, it remains relatively simple and practical for real-world applications. This accessibility allows for broader interdisciplinary research, bridging physics, biology, and related sciences in a shared effort to decipher the nature of life.

This Special Issue represents a significant step forward in these investigations. By exploring entropy-driven mechanisms, nonequilibrium dynamics, and the role of external perturbations, we move closer to a physics-based definition of what it means to be alive. We hope that future advances in nonequilibrium physics and entropy analysis will bring us even closer to understanding the physical foundations of life and its origins.

Dr. Krzysztof Wojciech Fornalski
Guest Editor

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