Softening the "crystal-scaffold" for life's emergence

TL;DR

This paper explores how electromagnetic interactions in structured water and magnetic colloids could have facilitated the emergence of life's fundamental properties like metabolism and replication in early Earth conditions.

Contribution

It proposes a novel scenario where electromagnetic patterns on catalytic colloids influence structured water, aiding the emergence of life-like processes in prebiotic environments.

Findings

Electromagnetic patterns could have directed self-assembly of early life components.

Structured water and magnetic colloids may have stabilized symmetry-broken quantum states.

External magnetic fields might have influenced prebiotic chemical organization.

Abstract

Del Giudice's group study how water can organize on hydrophilic surfaces forming coherent domains (loaning energy from the quantum vacuum), plus quasi-free 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 - c.f. 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, 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.