Hi friends, Michael of the Shakhnovich group asked me to forward this along.
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Hi everyone,
The speaker for next week’s Theochem lecture (see details below) will be Jeremy England
from MIT. He’ll be visiting Harvard the day before, on Tuesday, October 20.
Unfortunately, he can only be here for two hours in the morning, from9:30 AM to 11:30 AM.
If you would like to meet with him during this time, please let me know ASAP — given the
short time window, most or all of the meetings will probably have to be in small groups,
but let me know if you have any preferences.
Many thanks,
Michael
Jeremy England (MIT), “Statistical Physics of Adaptation”
Wednesday, October 21, 4 PM, MIT Building 4, room 163
Many-body systems that are driven far from thermal equilibrium can exhibit a seemingly
endless range of different "self-organization" phenomena, whether during long
periods of transient relaxation over a hierarchy of timesacles, or in an ergodic
steady-state. Indeed, the range of possible behaviors is so diverse that it includes (but
is not limited to) everything that living things do! In the face of such phenomenological
diversity, it is difficult to articulate any thermodynamic commonality that might be
analogous to the tendency to minimize free energy observed in equilibrated systems. Here,
we try to exploit recent fundamental progress in our understanding of far-from-equilibrium
dynamics to develop predictive thermodynamic principles for a general class of driven
self-organized systems. We find there is a language in which Darwinian selection in
biological systems may be thought of as a special case of a more general physical tendency
for "dissipative adaptation" that arises from the correlation between
irreversible changes in shape and the absorption of external work. We close by exploring
this hypothesis in different simulation frameworks.
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Michael Manhart, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral fellow
Harvard University, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology
12 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
Office: Mallinckrodt M-109
Web:
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~mmanhart