4 ms·

I'm going to guess he means they work via chemistry and exploiting heat in the system ie brownian ratchets.

• Balgair 12y ago
  Specifically, Gibbs Free Energy (G = Heat - Temp*(Change in Entropy)). Basically, the energy available is the heat in the system minus some chaotic stuff (and no, you can't make it better, because physics). I have a good physics background and what is most supprising to me is how alive cells are. I initially came into the bio field just as the OP talks about, with the idea that cells are just tiny chemistry machines that are very complicated. I figured that eventually, we'd understand the cell from top to bottom give or take a century. Now.... not so much. Cells, especially eukaryotes like us and yeast, are just so alive to me. They do weird things and act on their own. You would think that with enough constraints in the inputs you would be able to very precisely predict what any one cell would do. Nope. They go off and do their own thing, replicate in some strange way, find some food source you never thought they could digest, eat each other, have sex in some novel way. And it's not just that you are not constraining the system enough either, or that the system is inherently chaotic and you see improbable events because of that. They really are alive and want to stay that way. I know this is not a good explanation, and that real science still has a lot to say about it. But with my background I felt the way OP did, that it was all overlapping Gaussian curves and gradients in N-space that makes it look alive. But now, having seen it up close and watched it all, now I am pretty certain that life is different somehow.
  • deleted 12y ago
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