Abstract
Living matter is characterized by its variegated potential energy landscape possessing a proneness to continually absorb externally supplied energy. This enables it to ascend from its momentary energy minimum state to one of its myriad barriers only to subsequently descend to a new minimum with a potentiality to perform new functions or processes, in the while exuding energy (mainly in the form of heat). As in studies of molecular intersystem crossing, the jumping processes are describable in terms of quantum states. In this work we derive the low energy quantum states for those three templated self-assembling processes, self-replication, metabolism and self-repair that are commonly regarded as distinguishing animate from inanimate substance. The outcome of each process is a new, long-living, stable molecular aggregate characterized by its specific conformation, comprising a host of micro-states associated with sub-conformations and patterned upon the template. The provenance of these newly-formed states is obtained here by a unified formalism for all three processes, based on a Hamiltonian, constructed in an abstract Hilbert-space framework, whose essences are bilinear coupling terms in the Hamiltonian between the template and the bath, as well as between the reactants and the bath. Treating these terms by second order perturbation, one finds in low lying quantum states an alignment between the template and the product, somewhat analogous to the Kramers-Anderson superexchange mechanism, with the bath replacing the bridging anion and by exploitation of the decohering due to the randomness of the bath. The idea underlying this work, recurrent in the biological literature and here expressed in a Physics, Hamiltonian framework, is the correlative unity of the whole biological system comprising multiple organs.
Highlights
The dichotomy of living versus inanimate matter is one of the central puzzles in our understanding of the world around us and as such has occasioned a wide literature [1]-[7]
It is commonly asserted that living systems are distinguished by their faculty for self-replication, metabolism and self-repair
The three transformations treated here are those for the normal flow of biological information: DNA can be copied to DNA (DNA replication), DNA information can be copied into mRNA, and proteins can be synthesized using the information in mRNA as a template, known as the central dogma of biology [43] and predicated at each stage upon the existence of a template
Summary
The dichotomy of living versus inanimate matter is one of the central puzzles in our understanding of the world around us and as such has occasioned a wide literature [1]-[7]. In a unified formalism for each of the three above mentioned conformational changes of biological organs, the present work shows how each CS in the outcome organ is parented by the analogous CS in the template This is achieved by deriving low-lying eigenstates for the template-product organ pair from a postulated Hamiltonian, whose notable features are the organs’ bilinear interaction terms with the environment (the “bath”). From the Physics viewpoint, in the past self-replication (SR) has been treated as a process, subject to laws of non-equilibrium Thermodynamics or Dynamic Statistical Mechanics (e.g., [31] for a recent account); here it is treated by consideration of the microscopic entities of which it is composed As such, these are subject, like all other material entities, to Quantum Mechanics (QM), and as a consequence require description in terms of the basic brick-stones of QM, namely “quantal states”. SR being a process, implies by definition “transitions” and more precisely in QM: transitions between the states pre- and post-SR; their description is avoided here due to the fact that the status of transitions in QM (termed as “Measurements”) is problematic and controversial
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