Chapter 2

What’s inside cells

Architecture is the scientific, correct, and magnificent play of

volumes assembled under the light. – Le Corbusier

Chapter 1 exposed an apparent incompatibility between physical law and the living world (the
apparently spontaneous generation of order by living things), and proposed the outline of a reconcil-
iation (living things ingest high-quality energy and give off low-quality energy). With this physical
backdrop, we’re now ready to look a bit more closely into the organization of a living cell, where
the same ideas play out over and over. This chapter sketches thecontextfor the various phenomena
that will concern us in the rest of the book:

• Each device we will study is a physical object; itsspatialcontext involves its location
  in the cell relative to the other objects.


• Each device also participates in some processes; itslogicalcontext involves its role in
  these processes relative to other devices.

Certainly this introductory chapter can only scratch the surface of this vast topic.^1 But it is useful
to collect some visual images of the main characters in our story, so that you can flip back to them
as they appear in later chapters.
This chapter has a very different flavor from the others. For one thing, there will be no formulas
at all. Most of the assertions will appear with no attempt to justify them. Most of the figures have
detailed captions, whose meaning may not be clear to you until we study them in detail in a later
chapter. Don’t worry about this. Right now your goal should be to finish this chapter knowing a
lot of the vocabulary we will use later. You should also comeawaywith a general feeling for the
hierarchy of scalesin a cell, and a sense of how the governing principles at each scale emerge from,
but have a character different from, those at the next deeper scale.
Finally, the exquisite structures on the following pages practically beg us to ask: How can a
cell keep track of everything, when there’s nobody in there running the factory? This question has

©c2000 Philip C. Nelson

(^1) If you’re not familiar with the vocabulary of this chapter, you will probably want to supplement it by reading
the opening chapters of any cell biology book; see for example the list at the end of this chapter.

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