Artemy Kolchinsky

The characterization of life as a thermodynamic phenomenon out of equilibrium is usually attributed to Schrödinger.

What if I told you that he wasn't the first (not even the second😶‍🌫️) to reach that famous and influential conclusion?/1

#complexitycat🐈‍⬛

amahury.github.io/posts/reinve...

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences: Vol 380, No 1936

It's part of a great special issue on fundamental constraints on the origins of life, organized by
@ricardsole.bsky.social and Chris Kempes royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202...

After a long time in the making, my paper on nonequilibrium thermodynamics of Darwinian evolution has been published in Philosophical Transactions B. Updated version: arxiv.org/abs/2112.02809

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences: Vol 380, No 1936

How dit life originate in our planet? How can we create it in the lab?Our @royalsocietypublishing.org Theme Issue "Origins of Life: the possible and the actual", coedited with @sfiscience.bsky.social C Kempes and Susan Stepney is out! royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202... @manlius.bsky.social

Possible biosignatures detected on Mars
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Modern aspects of Markov chains: entropy, curvature and the cutoff phenomenon The cutoff phenomenon is an abrupt transition from out of equilibrium to equilibrium undergone by certain Markov processes in the limit where the size of the state space tends to infinity: instead of ...

Reading this beautiful review of the "cutoff timescale" in Markov chains, the timescale over which a system relaxes from nonequilibrium to equilibrium behavior arxiv.org/abs/2508.21055

Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers We align the aligners

This new center strikes the right tone in approaching the AI alignment problem. alignmentalignment.ai

Can a single cell learn? Even without a brain, some microbes show simple forms of cognition. Can this basal cognition be engineered? Check our new paper with @jordiplam.bsky.social on the minimal synthetic circuits & their cognitive limits. @drmichaellevin.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Kyoto Workshop on Quantum Thermodynamics and Stochastic Thermodynamics 2025 Schedule and VenueDecember 8-12, 2025 Panasonic Auditorium, Yukawa Hall, YITP, Kyoto University, JapanScopeRecent advances in physics have increasingly highlighted the need to understand energy conver...

Helping to organize this workshop on quantum and stochastic thermodynamics in Kyoto, Japan, Dec 8-12. Resource theory, optimal transport, and more. Submissions open!

indico.yukawa.kyoto-u.ac.jp/event/68/

Physics of Life: Exploring Information as a Distinctive Feature of Living Systems Living systems are defined by their active acquisition and use of information. This Roadmap surveys current research on life's information processes and their importance for the search for life beyond...

Here is our new paper that we're really excited about. What makes a cell different from a rock? The answer we argue is the USE of information. But information carries meaning and that changes everything if we want to understand the "physics of life".

journals.aps.org/prxlife/abst...

Proud of this preprint with my friends Jonathan Bauermann and @artemyte.bsky.social, about chemical oscillators & phase separation! Main findings:
1. Phase separation controls frequency and amplitude of oscillations
2. If reactions are fast, spirals of droplets emerge!

arxiv.org/abs/2507.16030

How can we build a general theory of mutualistic communities? After five years, we finally completed a new Neutral Theory of Cooperation that is fully solved analytically and displays remarkable properties @jordipinero.bsky.social @artemyte.bsky.social @manlius.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2506.09737

We have a new preprint about measuring entropy production in high-dimensional systems, using ideas from information geometry. We successfully infer EP from brain recordings and spin models containing 1000+ degrees of freedom. With
@maguilera.net and Sosuke Ito arxiv.org/abs/2505.10444

How can physics contribute to understanding the evolution of complexity? Although great results have been produced over the last decades, some recent "theories" appear to ignore key ideas from evolutionary theory and are seriously flawed. Check this paper in PNAS www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1...

I suspect something like this may be possible, but not give very useful bounds for real organisms. The information gained by a death or replication seems independent from the energy dissipated in creating that organisms, i.e. whether it is a single replicating molecule or a whale

If anyone in the complex systems/computational neuroscience field in Europe is looking to poach an American scientist, I'm interested in what might be out there.
My scholar profile: scholar.google.com/citations?hl...

Joint European Thermodynamics Conference, May 26-30, Belgrade, Serbia. Honored to participate in a mini-symposium on stochastic thermo alongside Sarah Loos and Cai Dieball, and other sessions look fascinating. Abstracts due March 15. www.mi.sanu.ac.rs/JETC2025

TIL that scipost.org publishes several high quality physics journals, all open-access and without any publication fees. Maybe its one way to move beyond the current nightmare of academic publishing....

Maximizing Free Energy Gain Maximizing the amount of work harvested from an environment is important for a wide variety of biological and technological processes, from energy-harvesting processes such as photosynthesis to energy storage systems such as fuels and batteries. Here, we consider the maximization of free energy—and by extension, the maximum extractable work—that can be gained by a classical or quantum system that undergoes driving by its environment. We consider how the free energy gain depends on the initial state of the system while also accounting for the cost of preparing the system. We provide simple necessary and sufficient conditions for increasing the gain of free energy by varying the initial state. We also derive simple formulae that relate the free energy gained using the optimal initial state rather than another suboptimal initial state. Finally, we demonstrate that the problem of finding the optimal initial state may have two distinct regimes, one easy and...

How do systems—biological or technological—maximize energy harvested from their environments? A new study explores how the initial state of a system impacts free energy gain and extractable work and illustrates the findings through a simple information-engine model. https://doi.org/10.3390/e27

Between 2019 and 2023, researchers paid $8.968 billion to make papers open access. Imagine what else could be done with this money if it wasnt paid to for profit publishing companies...
👉 arxiv.org/abs/2407.16551

C'est moi 🍔

Can we design ecosystems? Can synthetic biology help unravel ecological complexity?
In this work, we define the scales of synthetic ecosystems: from test tube to the biosphere. With @ricardsole.bsky.social @jordiplam.bsky.social Dani Amor & Núria Conde. Plus, we got the front cover shorturl.at/1KHe1

Looks like an amazing summer school on nonequilibrium thermodynamics, from Christian Maes and Wojciech De Roeck
Leuven school: Basics of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics
indico.fys.kuleuven.be/event/106/

Hello, BlueSky! 🌟 We're excited to join this vibrant community. At OoLEN, we're dedicated to exploring the fascinating field of origin of life research. Follow us for updates, insights, and discussions. Let's embark on this journey together! #HelloBlueSky #OriginOfLife #OoLEN

I am getting back to old notes in my notebook. It is an island of order that tracks how ideas emerged. Sometimes, I see how wrong I was, others a glimpse of some good, forgotten intuition, and others, it turns out that the answer was already there, but I did not see it.

Re-upping:

Postdoc position (two-to-three years) at the Santa Fe Institute
on cogsci-inspired AI approaches to multimodal reasoning.

Start date flexible: target is Summer / Fall 2025.

Req: PhD in AI, ML, CogSci, or related area (by start date).

Apply by Nov. 22.

santafe.edu/about/jobs/p...

Postdoc jobs! In the physics department at Johns Hopkins. I would personally love to see applicants interested in complexity, stat mech, entropy...

academicjobsonline.org/ajo/JHU/Phys...