In perusing this special issue of Physics in Canada, you may wonder "what is biology doing in a physics journal? " To answer this question, one must realize that the field of biology is undergoing a revolution in which emergent collective behaviours of molecules take center stage. A major thrust of twenty-first century physics is to achieve a deep understanding of the form and function of these molecular collectives and to address fundamental questions such as "what is life?". These challenges run as deep as those about the origin of the universe, and are as fundamental as those about the indistinguishable nature of quantum particles.
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