This highly unusual book is a serious inquiry into Schrodinger's question, "What is life?", and at the same time 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 book is intended for all who love...

This volume contains papers based on the workshop "Energy and Information Transfer in Biological Systems: How Physics Could Enrich Biological Understanding," held in Italy in 2002. The meeting was a forum aimed at evaluating the potential and outlooks of a modern physics approach to understanding and describing biological processes, especially regarding the transition from the microscopic chemical scenario to the macroscopic functional configurations of living matter. In this frame some leading researchers presented and discussed several basic topics, such as the photon interaction with...

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. This third edition includes findings on the central role of biological water in organizing living processes.

This highly unusual book is a serious inquiry into Schrodinger's question, "What is life?", and at the same time 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 book is intended for all who love...

The scope of this extraordinary selection of essays, distilled from nearly a thousand works that the author has written, is literally the entire universe and universe of knowledge. It charts the author's quest for the meaning of life faced with a dominant knowledge system she regards as incoherent, meaningless, and often acting against people and planet. She shows how contemporary scientific findings across all disciplines already provide an authentic knowledge system that's coherent with life and the universe. The aim is to transform science thoroughly from inspiration to research to...

The scope of this extraordinary selection of essays, distilled from nearly a thousand works that the author has written, is literally the entire universe and universe of knowledge. It charts the author's quest for the meaning of life faced with a dominant knowledge system she regards as incoherent, meaningless, and often acting against people and planet. She shows how contemporary scientific findings across all disciplines already provide an authentic knowledge system that's coherent with life and the universe. The aim is to transform science thoroughly from inspiration to research to...