What Is Life from a Physics Perspective? Toward a Fundamental Physical Theory of Living Matter

This interdisciplinary paper investigates the fundamental physics underlying living systems, synthesizing historical insights from Schrödinger’s “negative entropy” concept through Prigogine’s dissipative structures to modern frameworks including nonequilibrium thermodynamics, stochastic thermodynamics, information theory, active matter, autopoiesis, the free energy principle, dissipative adaptation, and constructor theory. It articulates key physical principles distinguishing living from non-living matter—self-organization, information processing, replication, adaptation, and evolution—while evaluating philosophical implications regarding reductionism, emergence, teleology, and the prospects for a unified theory of life grounded in entropy production, information acquisition, and self-referential dynamics. The work identifies open challenges and future research directions at the physics-biology interface (co-authored with A. Emata, 2026).