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Alive or just Active: How Are Living Systems Different from Synthetic Matter?

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A major current theme in physics is the study of “active matter” -- matter made out of constituent components that consume energy to generate their own motion and forces. Such matter can self-organize into large-scale systems that exhibit a wide variety of emergent behaviors that have no analogues in properties of equilibrium systems. Among these are the processes and properties of living matter such as motile bacteria, the neurons in the brain, and swarms of insects. The study of active matter seeks out fundamental principles underlying the behavior of all such systems. This goal might seem overly ambitious because, to paraphrase Tolstoy, “all equilibrium systems are alike, but every nonequilibrium system is out of equilibrium in its own way.” The field, however, has recently enjoyed a breakthrough in understanding how active systems collectively break time-reversal symmetry by harnessing dissipative processes under the topological constraints that commonly arise in systems out of equ

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