
The physics of life - matco11
http://www.nature.com/news/the-physics-of-life-1.19105
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mathgenius
Wow, you can actually follow (some of?) the citations in this article and read
them. Nature posts this friendly little banner: "Online access to this article
has been provided by the nature.com content sharing initiative." Whatever that
means.

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jssmith
Neat stuff! I'm also really curious to see where exploring active materials
through the lens of computation and computer science might lead.

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rmohanx
Time to first 'active matter' inspired stock market simulation and HFT tool:
3...2...1...

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MichaelTerry
"A half-life often describes the decay of discrete entities, such as
radioactive atoms. In that case, it does not work to use the definition "half-
life is the time required for exactly half of the entities to decay". For
example, if there is just one radioactive atom with a half-life of 1 second,
there will not be "half of an atom" left after 1 second. There will be either
zero atoms left or one atom left, depending on whether or not the atom happens
to decay.

Instead, the half-life is defined in terms of probability. It is the time when
the expected value of the number of entities that have decayed is equal to
half the original number. For example, one can start with a single radioactive
atom, wait its half-life, and measure whether or not it decays in that period
of time. Perhaps it will and perhaps it will not. But if this experiment is
repeated again and again, it will be seen that - on average - it decays within
the half-life 50% of the time."

