ABSTRACT
The term ‘soft matter’ is now being used by some scientists as a simple descriptive title for a broad and diverse range of noncrystalline materials. They include polymers, surfactants, liquid crystals, colloids, emulsions, surfactant films and other materials with properties more complex than Newtonian liquids because they possess additional ‘structure’. Some scientists use the name ‘ultraweak solid’ for some of the soft matter structures with the weakest interactions, like colloids and emulsions. The DNA double-helix is the classic replicating structure, but there are simpler systems that exhibit aspects of replication. These involve chirality, ‘autocatalysis’ (where the products of a reaction act as catalysts, providing an acceleration of reaction rate) and polymerisation. Scientists consider that the fundamental feedback controls on levels of carbon dioxide in the carbon cycle and other critical features are physical and chemical rather than biological.
