Biophysics: How Physicists Think About Life

Abstract: Biology is the science dedicated to the study of the phenomenon of life. What can physicists, who typically study non-living matter, bring to the table when it comes to biology? A lot, actually. Since the publishing of Erwin Schrödinger’s seminal work “What is life?” in 1944, in which he—the founding father of quantum physics—predicted the structure of DNA almost a decade before it was discovered, physicists have been thinking about all kinds of biological problems, from evolution to bacterial division, and making sense of them using physical concepts such as energy conservation and entropy. But the most fundamental, and challenging, of them all is the question of how and why life arose in the first place. Can physicists shed light on this question?