What did Erwin Mean? The Physics of Information from the Materials Genomics of Aperiodic Crystals and Water to Molecular Information Catalysts and Life

Abstract

Erwin Schrodinger famously and presciently ascribed the vehicle transmitting the hereditary information underlying life to an `aperiodic crystal'. We compare and contrast this, only later discovered to be stored in the linear biomolecule DNA, with the information bearing, layered quasi-one-dimensional materials investigated by the emerging field of chaotic crystallography. Despite differences in functionality, the same information measures capture structure and novelty in both, suggesting an intimate coherence between the information character of biotic and abiotic matter---a broadly applicable physics of information. We review layered solids and consider three examples of how information- and computation-theoretic techniques are being applied to understand their structure. In particular, (i) we review recent efforts to apply new kinds of information measures to quantify disordered crystals; (ii) we discuss the structure of ice I in information-theoretic terms; and (iii) we recount recent experimental results on tris(bicyclo[2.1.1]hexeno)benzene TBHB), showing how an information-theoretic analysis yields additional insight into its structure. We then illustrate a new Second Law of Thermodynamics that describes information processing in active low-dimensional materials, reviewing Maxwell's Demon and a new class of molecular devices that act as information catalysts. Lastly, we conclude by speculating on how these ideas from informational materials science may impact biology.

27 pages, 9 figures, 104 citations; http://csc.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/wdem.htm

References in corpus (5)

• The Organization of Intrinsic Computation: Complexity-Entropy Diagrams and the Diversity of Natural Information Processing
• Demon Dynamics: Deterministic Chaos, the Szilard Map, and the Intelligence of Thermodynamic Systems
• Beyond crystals: the dialectic of materials and information
• Dissipationless Information Erasure and Landauer's Principle
• Diffraction Patterns of Layered Close-packed Structures from Hidden Markov Models

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Multivariate Dependence Beyond Shannon Information
• Order and Information in the Patterns of Spinning Magnetic Micro-disks at the Air-water Interface
• Experimental test of Sinai's model in DNA unzipping
• A Markov theoretic description of stacking disordered aperiodic crystals including ice and opaline silica
• The Origins of Computational Mechanics: A Brief Intellectual History and Several Clarifications
• A hidden Markov model for describing turbostratic disorder applied to carbon blacks and graphene
• Finitary Process Evolution I: Information Geometry of Configuration Space and the Process-Replicator Dynamics