MPIDS Colloquium: Broken symmetries in living matter

Active processes in living systems create a novel class of nonequilibrium matter composed of many interacting components that individually consume energy and collectively generate motion or me-chanical stress. In this talk, I will discuss experimental tools and conceptual frameworks we develop to uncover laws governing fluctuations, order, and self-organization in systems in which individual components break time reversal symmetry. I will describe how these frameworks provide powerful insight into dynamics of nonequilibrium living systems across scales, from the emergence of ther-modynamic arrow of time to spatiotemporal organization of signaling protein patterns and discovery of odd elasticity.