Life with Metabolism VS Replication

It is logically possible to postulate organisms composed of pure hardware, capable of metabolism but incapable of replication. It is possible to postulate organisms composed of pure software, capable of replication but incapable of metabolism. And if the functions of life are separated in this fashion, it is to be expected that the latter type of organism will become an obligatory parasite upon the former. This logical analysis of the functions of life helps to explain and to correct the bias...

 Beauty is More Important than Accuracy

I think that there is a moral to this story, namely that it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment. If Schroedinger had been more confident of his work, he could have published it some months earlier, and he could have published a more accurate equation .... It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress. If there is not complete ...

 Life as the Reduction of Entropy

During the present century a few physicists have tried to define life. Bernal, Schroedinger, and Wigner all came to the same general conclusion, that life is a member of the class of phenomena which are open or continuous systems able to decrease their internal entropy at the expense of substances or free energy taken in from the environment and subsequently rejected in a degraded form. This definition is not only difficult to grasp but is far too general to apply to the specific detection of...