Authors: Christina Hueschen & Rob Philips

In recent decades, the theory of active matter has emerged as a powerful tool for exploring the differences between living and nonliving states of matter.

“The Restless Cell” provides a self-contained, quantitative description of how the continuum theory of matter has been generalized to account for the complex and sometimes counterintuitive behaviors of living materials.

Christina Hueschen and Rob Phillips begin by illustrating how classical field theory has been used by physicists to describe the transport of matter by diffusion, the elastic deformations of solids, and the flow of fluids.