From Solid State to Bio-Complexity: On the Emerging Science of Emergence

The challenge of understanding bio-complexity can hardly be addressed within the ‘usual’ reductionism school of thought. We approach contemporary bio-challenges by adopting the view ‘more is different’, hence the science of emergence. Emergence was introduced by biologists, as it has a natural place within bio-complexity and yet is an integral part of the contemporary physics. Emergence is the process of complex pattern formation from simpler rules. Emergent structures are patterns not created by a single event or rule. For a phenomenon to be termed emergent it should generally be unpredictable from a lower level description. There is nothing that commands the system to form a pattern, but instead the interactions of each part to its immediate surroundings causes a complex process which leads to order. Most of our present science is emergent and many of the ‘archetype’ models and techniques of physics are successfully adopted to the bio-context. We also give a summary of some of our ongoing projects on scanning near-field optical microscopy applied to the fluorescent imaging of neuronal cells and the expression of tagged glutamate receptors in organotypic slice cultures from rat brain.

Keywords: Physics, Biology, Emergence, Reductionism, SNOM, Bio imaging.