Broken symmetries of life

Traveling Phase Boundaries with the Broken Symmetries of Life... 

We call these three elements the Broken Symmetries of Life. The surprising result is that a model system with just these three elements, also knows time [2]. 

How do we model these three broken symmetries of life before being carried off to be burned at the stake ... 

The first Broken Symmetry of Life, we identified with a liquid crystal-isotropic liquid transition. Something (i.e., the liquid crystal order parameter) emerges from nothing, the primordial soup. 

The surprising result is that our liquid crystal model system with just these three broken symmetries of life knows time, another feature of living systems. It does not learn about time after it has been pushed far from equilibrium and is close to turbulence. It knows time as soon as the nonequilibrium driving force is strong enough to enforce a pattern. Even its first pattern is characterized by a frequency, co. When i 0, the interface reverts back to its featureless dead state = 0 and co = 0. 

The first surprising conclusion is that a model system with just the three elements that we have characterized as the Broken Symmetries of Life, also knows time. Its nonchiral analogue, the traveling nematic-isotropic phase bormdary does not know time. The argument given is that the existence of an intrinsic length, p, in cholesteric liquid crystals, implies a frequency for its response to perturbations in its structure. 

The macroscopic implication of the Broken Symmetries of Life shown by the minimal model is profound because living systems necessarily know time, they also have access to turbulence. 

Finally, we conclude that with his interest in chirality in liquid crystals for many years now, an interest we have shared, Professor Gerd Heppke has demonstrated his perspicacity and good taste in scientific problems. May you have many more years of happy experiences offered by the ineluctable pleasures of chirality—and the Broken Symmetries of Life—particularly broken time reversal symmetry. 

The metal-catalyzed amplification of e.e. in small molecules, demonstrated by Soai and coworkers, along with the chiral enrichment of amino arid polymers by sequential polymerization/depolymerization steps, have shown that small enantiomeric excesses in nearly racemic mixtures can be reactively amplified to produce chiral dominance. These real chemical systems, which include plausible prebiotic reactions, experimentally demonstrate the principle of the chiral amplification of a spontaneously broken chiral symmetry in a dynamic and authentic chemical milieu. Therefore amplification to dominance of a small chiral excess of both small and polymeric molecules can be credibly incorporated into an origin-of-life model. 

To model the second element of Life s Broken Symmetries, we chose cholesteric liquid crystals (N ) as they are chiral liquid crystals. 

Are there any remedies in sight within approximate Kohn-Sham density functional theory to get correct energies connected with physically reasonable densities, i. e., without having to use wrong, that is symmetry broken, densities In many cases the answer is indeed yes. But before we consider the answer further, we should point out that the question only needs to be asked in the context of the approximate functionals for degenerate states and related problems outlined above, an exact density functional in principle also exists. The real-life solution is to employ the non-interacting ensemble-Vs representable densities p intro-... 

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