What is life?
by Addy Pross · first published 2012
4mentions
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3HN commenters
2014–2019first – last mentioned
67% recommend33% neutral
Seventy years ago, Erwin Schrodinger posed a simple, yet profound, question: 'What is life?'. How could the very existence of such extraordinary chemical systems be understood? This problem has puzzled biologists and physical scientists both before, and ever since. Living things are hugely complex and have unique properties, such as self-maintenance and apparently purposeful behaviour which we do not see in inert matter. So how does chemistry give rise to biology? Did life begin with replicating molecules, and, if so, what could have led the first replicating molecules up such a path? Now, dev
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on “Ask HN: What books fundamentally changed the way you think about the world?” ↗There's a very interesting book called "What is Life - How Chemistry becomes Biology" [1] by Addy Pross (homepage: [2]) in which he claims, among other things, that there is no clear boundary between chemistry and biology. Here's a review if you don't…
on “A chemical clue to how life started on Earth” ↗…event that could be called the beginning of life. Here is an (accessible?) article on it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3843823/ One of the authors (Addy Pross) even wrote a book called What is Life - How Chemistry becomes Biology about this idea (https://www.amazon.de/What-Life-Chemistry-Becomes-Landmark/d... ). There's a review of the book at this link [PDF]: https://www.pagepress.org/journals/index.php/eb/article/view...
on “Dividing Droplets Could Explain Origin of Life” ↗…chemistry. My source code is a very long one dimensional array of four repeated symbols. I think it was Ed Wilson who pointed out the 1d DNA leading to 3d structures (perhaps Schroedinger in his book What is Life or Gould in one of the many essays). I can track the reference down if needed. Meta: I think you are wrong, but I'm surprised at the degree of down-voting.
on “Building an Open Source Laptop” ↗