Science was created in Greece with a significant contribution from Egypt
Oὐδὲν χρῆμα μάτην γίνεται ἀλλα πάντα ἐκ λόγου τε καὶ ὑπ᾽ ἀνάγκης

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Do protein agents « animate » biological chemistry?


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We perceive the world through four categories of objective being: space, time, mass and energy. To this list, physics adds information as an essential component. The involvement of information resolves the conflicts between classical and quantum physics. From a heuristic point of view alone, information is a genuine category of reality. Accumulation of information is the consequence of a concrete substantiation, an incarnation into matter endowed with mass of those agents that James Clerk Maxwell invented in 1871, known today as « Maxwell's demons ».

Here, we develop the consequences of the principle discovered by Rolf Landauer in 1961, and which has taken decades to understand. Reflecting on what common sense calls information - with the connotation of what might be « useful » information, or information with contextual value - Landauer demonstrated that the creation of information, contrary to popular belief, is reversible, it does not dissipate energy. How Maxwell's demon proceedsWhat does consume energy is the process of resetting the agents that generate information to their ground state, enabling them to perform their function once again. If we think of living organisms as analog (rather than digital) computers capable of generating computers  we need to include the presence of agents that drive and control the assembly line of the machine's offspring. These energy-dissipating agents are absent from the standard vision of computing. If we then explore the functions of the cell that seem to dissipate energy for no apparent reason, analysis of the genome sequence reveals numerous genes that code for these functions. This discovery sheds light on the heart of what makes biological chemistry seem 'animate', a feature of life that has always remained elusive.

+ Caveat : The epilogue to The Delphic Boat. Harvard University Press, 2003. Scientists should have no name...

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