Introduction
For the natural philosophers of the Enlightenment, the notion of active matter would
be associated with the gnawing question of whether the newly discovered laws of
mechanics could be extended to life itself. There were strong theological objections:
the élan vital emanating from God had to be breathed into passive matter to bring it to
life. Vitalism persisted throughout the rational 19th century; even Louis Pasteur supported his belief in vitalism by disproving the spontaneous generation of organisms
from non-living matter. With time, matter became more and more familiar. The four
classical elements, earth, water, air, and fire, could now be associated with the four
states of matter, solid, liquid, gas, and plasma, governed on the macroscopic level
by thermodynamic laws. Yet, it was not until the late 20th century that the wealth
of behavior of far-from-equilibrium nonlinear systems was finally appreciated, and
understood to be essential for life itself.
When does matter become active? The modern usage of this term is surprisingly
novel: it first appeared in the paper by Ramaswamy and Simha (2006) as the appellation of the fledgling research field that has been rapidly expanding since then. It
largely applies to interactions involving living organisms and their constituent parts,
but also extends to biomorphic materials and designs. The studies of active matter
could flourish only in this century: they are impossible without computer power
and precision experiments, penetrating into the microscopic mechanisms of active
motion.
Was there active matter before life? Perhaps, this is a matter of a definition.
According to Chaté (2020), “active matter physics is about systems in which energy
is dissipated at some local level to produce work”. This definition, though part
of a much more narrowly focused view, implies an affirmative answer, widening
the notion of active matter to all non-equilibrium processes. On the other hand,
Needleman and Dogic (2017) assert that “active matter is different from traditionally
studied non-equilibrium phenomena”, in which “the entire system is driven away from
equilibrium by energy provided through an external macroscopic boundary”. They
cite the statement by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in a letter to Damaris Masham:
“I define the Organism, or natural Machine, as a machine in which each part is
a machine [. . .], whereas the parts of our artificial machines are not machines”.
1
For the natural philosophers of the Enlightenment, the notion of active matter would
be associated with the gnawing question of whether the newly discovered laws of
mechanics could be extended to life itself. There were strong theological objections:
the élan vital emanating from God had to be breathed into passive matter to bring it to
life. Vitalism persisted throughout the rational 19th century; even Louis Pasteur supported his belief in vitalism by disproving the spontaneous generation of organisms
from non-living matter. With time, matter became more and more familiar. The four
classical elements, earth, water, air, and fire, could now be associated with the four
states of matter, solid, liquid, gas, and plasma, governed on the macroscopic level
by thermodynamic laws. Yet, it was not until the late 20th century that the wealth
of behavior of far-from-equilibrium nonlinear systems was finally appreciated, and
understood to be essential for life itself.
When does matter become active? The modern usage of this term is surprisingly
novel: it first appeared in the paper by Ramaswamy and Simha (2006) as the appellation of the fledgling research field that has been rapidly expanding since then. It
largely applies to interactions involving living organisms and their constituent parts,
but also extends to biomorphic materials and designs. The studies of active matter
could flourish only in this century: they are impossible without computer power
and precision experiments, penetrating into the microscopic mechanisms of active
motion.
Was there active matter before life? Perhaps, this is a matter of a definition.
According to Chaté (2020), “active matter physics is about systems in which energy
is dissipated at some local level to produce work”. This definition, though part
of a much more narrowly focused view, implies an affirmative answer, widening
the notion of active matter to all non-equilibrium processes. On the other hand,
Needleman and Dogic (2017) assert that “active matter is different from traditionally
studied non-equilibrium phenomena”, in which “the entire system is driven away from
equilibrium by energy provided through an external macroscopic boundary”. They
cite the statement by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in a letter to Damaris Masham:
“I define the Organism, or natural Machine, as a machine in which each part is
a machine [. . .], whereas the parts of our artificial machines are not machines”.
1