Haunting Thoughts

Ducks walking in the park at UNIST near Ulsan

When I walk around the campus, several questions buzz in my ear (apart from usual worry), mostly philosophical. The question that haunts me most are-

1. What is life?

2. How human beings are created?

3. Why all living organism dies?

4. What happens after we die? Do we have soul etc.?

I know the origin of these questions are intrinsic and are driven by the curiosity to know about the existence of humans.

In an attempt to answer these questions - understanding the phenomena exhibited by the living entity at a subcellular level, their behaviour and response to external change would be very important. The founding stone in an attempt to answer the origin of life has already been kept by many pioneers, the one that inspire me is Erwin Schrodinger and his lecture notes titled "What is Life?".

Today a large number of researchers, working in this domain are trying to describe the subject of biology from the viewpoint of physics. I am sure, the answers to these questions are not so simple and may require long time.

When it comes to me, I always get amazed when I see the applicability of a physical law, explaining something outside physics, such as; traffic dynamics, crowd dynamics, population dynamics of bacteria or virus, evolution or morphogenesis etc. Though, having studied physics, it was my routine job to calculate force or energy and study the kinematics or dynamics of any system. But when it comes to living system, my interest expunges everything and submerge me into the deep philosophy.

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