I will describe Maxwell's demon, the Smoluchowski ratchet and pawl, the Szilard engine that relates information and heat, and some work of Brillouin, Landauer, Bennett and others on these topics.
This will be a one hour crash course on some of the basic ideas of classical mechanics: configuration space, Lagrangians, the principle of stationary action, and Noether's theorem.
If networks of chemical reactions are the circuits of biology then catalysts are the switches. But which species should be called catalysts? Chemistry textbooks answer this question when there is a single reaction.
An elaborate symphony is orchestrated in every living cell. The score is written in DNA, and is played out by RNA and protein enzymes, but where is the conductor of this symphony?
How can one write a computer program that outputs itself? Is the sentence this sentence is false true or false? Can one write a program that will distinguish between programs that have infinite loops, and those that do not?
