Making Living Matter from the Bottom up
Public lecture by Ramin Golestanian, Cambridge University Physics Society
November 2023
There are many ways to study life, and one that is particularly appealing to physicists is regarding it as self-organized active soft matter that is away from equilibrium "just the right way". In this talk, I will discuss this notion, and provide a number of examples of how we can begin to put together simple systems - from basic ingredients that we fully understand - that would exhibit the kind of active behaviour we find in living systems. I will also present a number of questions concerning the origin of life and propose some preliminary possible answers, from the perspective of theoretical physics.