Walking droplets, swimming microbes: on memory in physics and life

Abstract

Whirling and swerving, a bacterium is swimming in a test tube, foraging for food. On the surface of a vibrating bath, a droplet starts walking. A certain similarity, but mostly dissimilarity, between the physical memory that emerges in Couder's droplet experiments and the biological memory of the bacterium is noted. It serves as a starting point for a short perspective and speculation on the multilevel, loopy memory of living matter.

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• Dimensional Reduction in Complex Living Systems: Where, Why, and How
• Spontaneous Chiral Symmetry Breaking in a Random Driven Chemical System
• Overload wave-memory induces amnesia of a self-propelled particle
• Exotic Topology in Ordinary Soft Matter
• Self-organization and memory in an disordered solid subject to random loading
• Statistical self-organization of a gas of interacting walking drops in a confining potential