The nature of biophysical laws

by Prof. Edoardo Milotti (Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Trieste)

Tuesday 19 Nov 2013, 14:30 → 15:30 Europe/Rome

Rostagni meeting room (INFN-LNL)

In 1989 Eugene Wigner asserted that “It is … important to realize that physics does not contain the theory that I live and have desires and emotions”, and for many physicists this is a strikingly dramatic statement. How do we reconcile this with our knowledge of the basic laws of nature? Does life really require new “fundamental” laws that are not part of present-day physics? After a broad discussion of these topics, I give a detailed account of a specific — and in my opinion, paradigmatic — example, which starts with a computational study of tumor growth and eventually leads to the synthesis of a new metabolic scaling law for solid tumors.