Softening the “Crystal Scaffold” for Life’s Emergence

Abstract

<jats:p>Del Giudice’s group studies how water can organize on hydrophilic surfaces forming coherent domains (loaning energy from the quantum vacuum), plus quasifree electrons, whose excitations produce cold vortices, aligning to ambient fields. Their electric and magnetic dipolar modes can couple to oscillatory (electric-organic dipoles) and/or rotary (magnetic-mineral dipoles), besides responding to magnetic potentials. Thus, imprinted electromagnetic patterns of catalytic colloids—compared with Cairns-Smith’s “crystal scaffold”—on their structured water partners could have equipped the latter with a selection basis for “choosing” their context-based “soft-matter” (de Gennes) replacements. We consider the potential of the scenario of an external control on magnetic colloids forming in the Hadean hydrothermal setting (of Russell and coworkers)—via a magnetic rock field—conceptually enabling self-assembly, induction of asymmetries, response effects towards close-to-equilibrium dynamics, and associative networks, besides providing a coherent environment for stabilizing associated symmetry-broken quanta and their feedback interactions with those of coherent water domains, to address the emergence of metabolism and replication.</jats:p>

Field-Control, Phase-Transitions, and Life’s Emergence

“…Since field-induced (dipolar) ordering offers an interaction mechanism that does not make use of any chemical or geometrical constraints of the particles, we speculate that this would enable the independently acting components to explore structural configurations at every scale. And, inspired by the observations of Russell et al ( 1989 , 1990 ), Sawlowicz ( 1993 , 2000 ), and Preisinger and Aslanian ( 2004 ), we have conjectured that moderate local magnetic fields could cause nested formations at the nano-scale as soft scaffolds for life’s emergence (see Merali, 2007 ; Mitra and Mitra-Delmotte, 2011 ; Mitra-Delmotte and Mitra, 2010a , b , 2012 ). Further, in gradient-rich (redox, pH, temperature) environments, as in the mound, gradient-dissipating organic fractal structures (Seely and MacKlem, 2012 ) – assembling from building blocks at level-II – could have gradually replaced the functioning modules of the control-level-I inorganic networks.…”