What Is Life-Answers Based On Physical Principles

The essence of life has ever attracted the eye-lights of scholars in diverse fields. In one way, the structure, function and information of life systems are very complicated. On the other hand, the micro-elements of life, operation rules, structure of organizations and some other features of life reveal underlying consistency. It is the self-organization of various levels system makes intricate complications and amazing consistency seeming diametrically opposite be perfectly united together, which results in life systems behave as open, multi-level, multi-scale, nonlinear dynamical systems far from equilibrium.So far, although there are many schools have given out the definitions and theories of the nature of life, it is found that the profound discussions for the nature of life need to be further innovated and improved. In particularly, the applicable and operating theories that can include data information on the current life study also have not appeared. This paper proposes a new non-equilibrium statistical mechanics framework to analyze the interactions among cells and their environment of life, and the self-organizing formation process of life is elaborated. The theory is maximum flux principle (MFP): an open system far from equilibrium always seeks an optimization process so that the obtained flux from outside is maximal under given prices or constrains. By this theory, we further developed a new applied method for dealing with the data and information of life. This not only reveals the physical nature of life system theoretically, but also gives inspiration to the study of mathematical methods for using current rich information and data of life investigations.Based on the theory and applied method, we analyzed and simulated the life system at the molecular and organization levels separately. At molecular level, with a typical protein molecule as an example, we have deeply discussed fractal structure and its formation process of protein molecules, and applied the existing fractal dimension data to discuss the evolution process of some globulins molecules. At the organizational level, we chose micro-organization in biofilm as an example, through the growth model and stage reflected by the growth structural parameters, we discussed the mechanism for the growing and evolutionary of cells and organisms, and then provided theoretical guidance for life engineering. Finally, this paper briefly summed up the theoretical significance of this new theory and method for revealing the essence of life, and proposed the guidance for life science research and engineering; giving our definition for the nature of life in new perspectives.