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This highly unusual book began as a serious inquiry into Schrodinger's question, “What is life?”, and as a celebration of life itself. It takes the reader on a voyage of discovery through many areas of contemporary physics, from non-equilibrium thermodynamics and quantum optics to liquid crystals and fractals, all necessary for illuminating the problem of life. In the process, the reader is treated to a rare and exquisite view of the organism, gaining novel insights not only into the physics, but also into “the poetry and meaning of being alive.”
This much-enlarged third edition includes new findings on the central role of biological water in organizing living processes; it also completes the author's novel theory of the organism and its applications in ecology, physiology and brain science.
What Is It to Be Alive?
Do Organisms Contravene the Second Law?
Can the Second Law Cope with Organized Complexity?
Energy Flow and Living Cycles
How to Catch a Falling Electron
Towards a Thermodynamics of Organised Complexity
Sustainable Systems as Organisms
The Seventy-Three Octaves of Nature's Music
Coherent Excitations of the Body Electric
The Solid-State Cell
'Life is a Little Electric Current'
How Coherent Is the Organism? The Heartbeat of Health
How Coherent Is the Organism? Sensitivity to Weak Electromagnetic Fields
Life is All the Colors of the Rainbow in a Worm
The Liquid Crystalline Organism
Crystal Consciousness
Liquid Crystalline Water
Quantum Entanglement and Coherence
Ignorance of the External Observer
Time and Freewill
Description
This highly unusual book began as a serious inquiry into Schrodinger's question, “What is life?”, and as a celebration of life itself. It takes the reader on a voyage of discovery through many areas of contemporary physics, from non-equilibrium thermodynamics and quantum optics to liquid crystals and fractals, all necessary for illuminating the problem of life. In the process, the reader is treated to a rare and exquisite view of the organism, gaining novel insights not only into the physics, but also into “the poetry and meaning of being alive.”
This much-enlarged third edition includes new findings on the central role of biological water in organizing living processes; it also completes the author's novel theory of the organism and its applications in ecology, physiology and brain science.