III. Ecosmos: A Revolutionary Fertile, Habitable, Solar-Bioplanet, Incubator Lifescape

D. Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics of Living Systems

Witting, Lars. Inevitable Evolution: Back to The Origin and Beyond the 20th Century Paradigm of Contingent Evolution by Historical Natural Selection. Biological Reviews. 83/3, 2008. A Greenland Institute of Natural Resources scientist who studies walrus welfare provides an extended document on his theory, considered for over a decade, that an emphasis on selected variety alone misses life’s innate convergent arrow of time, an a priori lawfulness, since open biological systems are ultimately impelled and advanced by thermodynamic energies. With some 300 references, a good summary of how to engage this conceptual shift now underway so as to appreciate an abiding genesis.

For phenotypic characters that are closely linked to fitness I argue that we need a new paradigm of inevitable evolution based on a universal natural selection that unfolds inevitably and a priori from deterministic laws of self-replication, encompasses historical processes, and defines general directions of biotic evolution. A proposed model of selection by energetic state and density-dependent competitive interactions illustrates that the evolutionary unfolding of life-history organization in species on Earth can be explained as arising from first principles of self-replication, predicting that large-scale evolution will follow similar routes on similar planets. (260)

Wolchover, Natalie. First Support for a Physics Theory of Life. Quanta Magazine. Online July, 2017. An update of Jeremy England’s project (search) at MIT (search), with colleagues, to quantify how thermodynamic phenomena might possess an innate propensity for the formation of living, evolutionary systems. The occasion was two new papers: 1. Spontaneous Fine-Tuning to Environment in Many-Species Chemical Reaction Networks with Jordan Horowitz (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114/7565, 2017), and 2. Self-Organized Resonance during Search of a Diverse Chemical Space with Tai Kachman and Jeremy Owen (Physical Review Letters (119/038001, 2017), which have links in this report. We thus seem to be getting warmer as physical nature becomes more animate via these sophisticated explanations. But there is much to do, Sara Walker comments that an informational quality needs to be factored in for a full survey.

A qualitatively more diverse range of possible behaviors emerge in many-particle systems once external drives are allowed to push the system far from equilibrium; nonetheless, general thermodynamic principles governing nonequilibrium pattern formation and self-assembly have remained elusive, despite intense interest from researchers across disciplines. Here, we use the example of a randomly wired driven chemical reaction network to identify a key thermodynamic feature of a complex, driven system that characterizes the “specialness” of its dynamical attractor behavior. We show that the network’s fixed points are biased toward the extremization of external forcing, causing them to become kinetically stabilized in rare corners of chemical space that are either atypically weakly or strongly coupled to external environmental drives. (1. Significance)

Recent studies of active matter have stimulated interest in the driven self-assembly of complex structures. Phenomenological modeling of particular examples has yielded insight, but general thermodynamic principles unifying the rich diversity of behaviors observed have been elusive. Here, we study the stochastic search of a toy chemical space by a collection of reacting Brownian particles subject to periodic forcing. We observe the emergence of an adaptive resonance in the system matched to the drive frequency, and show that the increased work absorption by these resonant structures is key to their stabilization. Our findings are consistent with a recently proposed thermodynamic mechanism for far-from-equilibrium self-organization. (2. Abstract)

Wolfram, Stephen. The Second Law: Resolving the Mystery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Online: Wolfram Media, 2023. Since the 1980s, the polymath philosopher and software designer has developed a cellular automata computational method which has gained a wide and deep applicability. For his whole scale achievements, please visit his home site at stephenwolfram.com. See also his latest edition How Did We Get Here? The Tangled History of the Second Law of Thermodynamics at arXiv:2311.10722.

Ever since it was first formulated a century and a half ago, the Second Law of thermodynamics has an air of mystery about it. In this book, Stephen Wolfram builds on recent breakthroughs in the foundations of physics to propose that it emerges as a general feature of computational processes by virtue of their interplay with our similar activities as observers. In the book, Wolfram tells the story of his own quest as well as trace the whole history of the Second Law. We next sample its Table of Contents.

The Basic Arc of the Story · Heat Engines and the Beginnings of Thermodynamics · The Second Law Is Formulated · The Concept of Entropy · "Deriving" the Second Law from Molecular Dynamics · The Concept of Ergodicity · Maxwell's Demon · Coarse Graining and the "Modern Formulation" · The Second Law and Quantum Mechanics · Continuous Versus Discrete · So Where Does This Leave the Second Law?

A cellular automaton is a collection of cells arranged in a grid of specified shape, such that each cell changes state as a function of time, according to a defined set of rules driven by the states of neighboring cells.

Wolpert, David, et al.. Is stochastic thermodynamics the key to understanding the energy costs of computation. PNAS. 121/45, 2024. In a newsworthy item, eighteen thermo-informatic scholars at Imperial College London, Abdus Salam International Centre, Trieste, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Sandia National Laboratories, MIT and Sante Fe Institute including Thomas Ouldridge contribute a deep treatise about how the latest theories in this technical field can help manage and reduce the high energy requirements of large computational systems. (Google is resorting to small nuclear plants.)

The relationship between the thermodynamic and computational properties of physical systems has been a prime interest for many years. It has recently gained practical importance as the energetic cost of digital devices has exploded. Today’s computers obey multiple constraints on how they work, which affects their thermal properties since they operate far from equilibrium. Here we propose that the new field of stochastic thermodynamics can achieve a formal analytic process for these certain aspects. Our intent is then to show how these novel methods can provide better understandings of basic properties of physical realms as they are related to the computations they perform. (Long Abstract excerpt)

In this paper, we argue that recent results of stochastic thermodynamics can provide a mathematical framework for
quantifying the growing energetic costs of realistic (both artificial and biological) computational devices. In regard, this may provide major benefits for the design of future computers. Finally, by combining computer science with the theoretical tools of stochastic thermodynamics, we may uncover important new insights into all natural activities that perform computation in our universe. (8)

Stochastic thermodynamics,/u> is an emergent research field in statistical mechanics that uses multiple variables to analyze the non-equilibrium dynamics present in microscopic systems such as colloidal particles, biopolymers (DNA, RNA, and proteins), enzymes, and molecular motors. See, for example, Stochastic thermodynamics: From principles to the cost of precision by Udo Seifert at arXiv:1707.03759 and the book Stochastic Thermodynamics: An Introduction by Luca Peliti and Simone Pigolotti (2021).