Events

Date: 27 May 2025   Time: 15:00 - 16:00     

Location: MB-503

Symmetry is the cornerstone of theoretical physics, playing a crucial role across various scales. The pervasive presence of symmetries in the physical universe compels us to examine the question: if life arises as an emergent property from physical principles, what prevents the symmetry concepts used in physics from also elucidating the organizational patterns of life? We will attempt to bridge this gap between physics and biology using symmetries but with a twist. The traditional symmetry groups of physics are global and too rigid to describe biology. Instead, the notion of symmetry fibration for biological networks, derived from the mystic genius of Grothendieck's fibrations in category theory, are local, flexible, and adaptable to evolutionary pressures, providing the right framework for understanding not only biological but also artificial neural machineries. Fibrations explain how structure dictates function across various biological networks and reduce their complexity to the fundamental building blocks for biological computation.