Classical physics is a limiting case of the physics of life

Robert Rosen points out in his Essays on Life Itself that one of the striking features of Erwin Schrödinger’s essay What is Life? is his apologies, both for his physics, and for himself personally.¹

While repeatedly proclaiming the ‘universality’ of contemporary physics, he equally repeatedly points out (quite rightly) the utter failure of its laws to say anything significant about the biosphere and what is in it.

—Robert Rosen ²

Robert Rosen suggests that Erwin Schrödinger realized that the study of matter not just teach us about organisms, but that organisms teach us about matter.³ All living organisms involve open systems. Open systems are nothing like isolated, closed systems, near equilibrium.

Open systems…constitute in themselves a profound and breathtaking generalization of old physics, based as it is on the assumptions of excessively restrictive closure conditions, conservation laws, and similar nongeneric presumptions that simply do not hold for living things.

—Robert Rosen ⁴

The essence of an open system is…the necessity to invoke an “outside,” or an environment, in order to understand what is going on “inside.” That is, we must go to a larger system, and not to smaller ones, to account for what an open system is doing. That is why reductionism, or analysis, that only permits us to devolve system behavior upon subsystem behaviiors, fails for open systems.

—Robert Rosen ⁵

Life is not a marginal phenomenon within classical physics. Classical physics is a limiting case of the physics of life (open systems). Open systems have the (implicate) capacity to generate and maintain (explicate) order that is neither rigid nor fully predictable, and thus never fully computable.⁶

Notes:
1. Robert Rosen, Essays on Life Itself, p. 7.
2. Ibid..
3. Ibid., p. 20.
4. Ibid..
5. Ibid..
6. Ibid.. See also Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things, p. 1682.

Update 2022-10-23: Citations changed.