Information, Computation, and Thermodynamics in Biology

Living organisms are low-entropy, nonequilibrium physical systems that exhibit goal-directed behavior by harvesting free energy to sense, store information, compute, and act in fluctuating environments. The long-standing walls between nonequilibrium physics, information theory, and molecular biology are dissolving, revealing a unified landscape where living systems are understood as information engines – agents that process information under energetic constraints to measure their environment, erase old memories, and make responses in a world dominated by thermal noise. Scialog: ICTB will enable dialog across disciplines which include biology, chemistry, physics, synthetic biology, AI-driven informatics, and more, to stimulate ideas for advancing our understanding of simple (e.g., unicellular, multicellular, and aggregate) living systems, using existing and next-generation experiments, theory, and simulations that leverage information theoretic, computational and thermodynamic frameworks.