ABOUT THE LECTURE:
“Biology is messy,” says Kenneth Dill, and it’s “heavily about entropy.” Just look at how biological systems repeat entropy at every possible turn: a parent cell making two daughter cells, sending one DNA molecule to each; and the process of biochemical reactions, with water getting stripped off the molecules. Dill is convinced that the “language of biology in the future will be nonequilibrium statistical mechanics.” He’s engaged in experiments that explore how dynamical laws apply to very small biological systems, such as those inside cells.