Exposing Life’s Limits with Dimensionless Numbers

NOV 01, 1998

A crude device for quantification shows how diverse aspects of distantly related organisms reflect the interplay of the same underlying physical factors.

DOI: 10.1063/1.882079

Steven Vogel

The impressive performance of evolution as a design mechanism needs no belaboring. Physics, though, constitutes a larger reality that evolution can no more transcend than a cow can jump upward at escape velocity. Enzymes cannot act as Maxwellian demons, nor can birds turn off gravity. Physics limits life’s designs no less rigidly than it constrains our own technology.

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More about the Authors

Steven Vogel. Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.