Most complex eukaryotic organisms are either dead or alive. Yes, they can be sick, which is sort of in between, but sick is still “alive”.
In general, going from dead to alive is hard… Going from alive to dead requires disrupting any of several important core sub-equilibria of the living system.
It’s snowing out vs. not. Note: didn’t use raining because “misting” felt like more of an in between edge case than lightly snowing.
A door is either open or closed. Depending on the door, switching from closed to open or open to closed requires applying force and maybe adding some sort of friction device to keep the system in its new state.
(Cheating because I’ve seen this before.) Some natural and designed proteins function as switches with multiple stable states of comparable free energies.
I find 2 particularly interesting, because it matches my experience, but I have no idea what mechanism drives the system into discrete-ish states. Now I think about it, clouds seem related: we often see a “partly cloudy” sky with lots of discrete clouds scattered around and empty space between them, rather than a uniform less-concentrated cloudiness throughout the sky. That suggests bistability in cloud formation. What’s up with that?
Most complex eukaryotic organisms are either dead or alive. Yes, they can be sick, which is sort of in between, but sick is still “alive”. In general, going from dead to alive is hard… Going from alive to dead requires disrupting any of several important core sub-equilibria of the living system.
It’s snowing out vs. not. Note: didn’t use raining because “misting” felt like more of an in between edge case than lightly snowing.
A door is either open or closed. Depending on the door, switching from closed to open or open to closed requires applying force and maybe adding some sort of friction device to keep the system in its new state.
(Cheating because I’ve seen this before.) Some natural and designed proteins function as switches with multiple stable states of comparable free energies.
I find 2 particularly interesting, because it matches my experience, but I have no idea what mechanism drives the system into discrete-ish states. Now I think about it, clouds seem related: we often see a “partly cloudy” sky with lots of discrete clouds scattered around and empty space between them, rather than a uniform less-concentrated cloudiness throughout the sky. That suggests bistability in cloud formation. What’s up with that?