Travel Support Request for Institute for Advanced Study Workshop on Physics Approach to Simplifying Complexity in Biology; Hong Kong University, China; December 15-19, 2014.

2014年12月15日至19日，简化生物学复杂性的物理方法研讨会将把物理学家和生物学家聚集在一起，解决生物学中的基础科学问题。物理学家和生物学家正在共同努力，推动我们在预测、数量生物学的发展方面取得进展，这次研讨会在这个方向上是必不可少的。组织者让科学家们研究生物的起源和随时间演变的复杂性。生命的浮现现象很难从物理基本定律或数学定理中预测出来。新兴的生物体形成了一种独特的复杂适应物质状态；这种复杂的适应能力可能源于自然选择，因为自然选择的适应带来了越来越强的适应性。组织者将把亚洲的物理学和凝聚态社区与美国和欧洲的社区聚集在一起，并将他们与生物学家和生态学家合并，形成一个跨越多个学科的前沿努力。主题的范围将是广泛的，希望能够制定出统一的、定量的主题。研讨会将涵盖从复杂性的起源到集体行为的出现，再到复杂适应物质中的不稳定性等领域，这与许多误解的主题有关，如蛋白质功能障碍的动力学、社区中的集体冲突，以及从深层次角度看待癌症等疾病的根本起源。其影响将是找到统一的、简单但深刻的原理，这些原理可以从过去如此成功的物理学的统一角度将生物学令人困惑的复杂性联系在一起。

The December 15-19, 2014 Workshop on Physics Approach to Simplifying Complexity in Biology will bring together physical scientists together with biologists to address basic science problems in biology. Phyicists and biologists are working together to further our progress in the development of predictive, quantitative biology and this workshop is essential in this direction. The organizers bring scientists to examine both the origins of living matter and the complexity that has evolved with time. The emergent phenomena of life is hardly predictable from the fundamental laws of physics or the theorems of mathematics. Emergent living organisms form a unique state of complex adaptive matter; this complex adaptability presumably has its roots in natural selection because the adaptation of natural selection gives rise to ever increasing fitness.The organizers will bring together the physics and condensed matter communities in Asia with those in the US and Europe and merge them with biologists and ecologists to form a frontier effort that spans multiple disciplines. The range of subjects will be wide, in the hopes that unifying, quantitative themes can be mapped out. The workshop will cover areas ranging from The Origins of Complexity to The Emergence of Collective Behavior to Instability in Complex Adaptive Matter, which has connections to many ill-understood topics such as the dynamics of protein dis-function, collective conflicts in communities, and the fundamental origins of diseases such as cancer viewed from a deep perspective. The impact will be to find unifying, simple but deep principles which can tie together the bewildering complexity of biology from the unified perspective of physics which has been so successful in the past.