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The Building Blocks

Psyche Jane C. Atinen

The article The Biological Frontier of Physics, by Rob Phillips and Stephen R. Quake, has interestingly ventured out in discussing the role of physics in the realm of biology and, so, also of the building blocks of organisms the cell.

Many fields in science have undergone a slow progress over a comparatively long duration of time and had then exponentially developed towards many applications. Two systems that had undergone this kind of development are quantum physics and the study of networks. And one that is, at present, in the onset of its great exponential development is the study on biological systems and phenomenon. Physicists, at present and for the past decades, have ventured more and more deeply into biological systems especially in their dynamics. Studying the static structure is not enough. In order to understand the mechanisms and functions of the biological components, the dynamics of the biological systems must be studied as well. Moreover, quantitative analysis, as well as the qualitative one, on the dynamics must be considered too. By determining their equations of motion, the movements and behavior can be predicted more precisely by then. In fact, many physicists have already been studying on the dynamics of the cell which is the tiny unit comprising organisms bodies.

Cells are such interesting biological entities. Inside a highly decentralized system which is a very effective system. This decentralized structure of the cell causes its functions and flow of information to be in synchrony. On the other hand, in the case of a loss or degradation of a component in a cell, the

whole system, though lessened in performance, would still be functioning well as high as possible in comparison to a centralized system. Such is a wonderful design.

The building blocks of all bodies of organisms, the cells, are like miniature machines. But instead of these microscopic machines following the mechanisms of macroscopic ones, it turns out that these miniscule machines are actually the ones serving as models of an almost-perfect machine. They embody systems that show how a machine should be work and be structured so as to attain maximum performance given the limitations.

On another view, in studying the cell and as I can observe in science, all the objects studied so far the simple systems and even the complex ones are comprised of the simple building blocks. An example is the realm of elements we have already identified or synthesized that are already arranged in the periodic table. Each element is comprised of the parts which also constitute the others. They only differ in number. However, this small difference in the system component cannot be taken lightly for from it gushes forth the enormous dissimilarity of the system from the others. The proton is an example of this. The difference in the number of protons of the elements hydrogen and helium is just one. But, this single-proton-difference already makes the two vastly different from each other.

This characteristic of the elements is not only seen in atomic particles but in other systems as well. As noted in the article in which this paper focuses on, the cells are constituted by different organelles which are comprised of different combinations of building blocks that make up protein. Having the same case as in the elements, these parts of the cell have the same basic composition but only of varying combinations. This attests to the concept of simple building blocks wherein in this illustration, the minute difference in combination results to a great gap in similarity of the whole

systems. Perhaps, only perhaps this is why all of the fields in science are intertwined and cannot exist exclusively from each other. It is a hypothesis of mine that the world consists of such basic simple building blocks which, when varied even only a little, will branch out to an immeasurable number of diversified, yet connected, various things.

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