Background:
What is Life? This long-standing problem has attracted many physicists especially since Erwin Schrodinger published the famous book in 1944. nevertheless, this problem has not been solved yet. This is not because we lack complete knowledge of elements such as DNA, proteins and other molecules, but because we lack a theoretical framework provided by a new view of life. Indeed, we have been too much familiar with the traditional reductionists' view that requires identifying the elements at different levels of biological organization and understanding the relationships between the different levels.
On the basis of this traditional reductionism, however, we cannot understand how living things are different from nonliving things, because both are equally made of material molecules. To understand life itself, we must identify not only the elements, but also the elementary processes within the organism. Only then, normal states and disease states and even senescent states can be clearly interpreted in terms of dynamical changes in the elementary processes as well as plastic changes in the elements.
Regardless of whether the external environment remains constant or not, the organism is continually subject to the intrinsic variability at any level and scale. It therefore must be emphasized that transients and variations are essential and advantageous to life, because changes in the environment are important for successful adaptation. In this sense, we should not always expect that any biological system will show the same responses to the same stimuli. This situation apparently violates the reproducibility of the same events under the same conditions, although it has been central to physics.
Now we need paradigm shifts in the theoretical physics as well as modern biology. Along this line, the present symposium would try to attack the problems of life phenomena such as origin of life, development of multi-cellular organisms, evolutionary aspects of psychology, creations in arts, and aging toward death. Unfortunately, for example, the problem of aging has been largely neglected by most biologists, probably because the aging process is too complicated to seek a simple explanation. It therefore must be surprising that there is a simple explanation of aging, and that the general principles govern not only the aging of higher organisms, but also the origin of life and even brain function. It is endo-exo circulating processes as a synthesis of natural selection and self-organization that would take place under the general principles. Now is the best time to attack the long-standing problem: what is life?

Objectives:
As a centennial cerebration of late Professor Hideki Yukawa's birth, the objectives of this Nishinomiya-Yukawa International & Interdisciplinary Symposium are:
1)to search the new frontiers in theoretical physics based on the interaction of biology, computer science, physics, neuroscience, psychology, mathematics, philosophy, religion and even arts.
2)to highlight the current central problems in the multi-disciplinary fields and to try the new synthesis towards the fundamental understanding of complex biological systems from origin of life to aging and death.
3)to bring together motivated and enthusiastic junior scientists (graduate students and postdocs) with rather senior researchers in interdisciplinary fields to stimulate new ideas and establish contacts that may careers of the junior scientists.