ISIS Press Release 01/05/07
ISIS
Lecture
Keynote
lecture presented in Global Philosophy Forum, Haverford College, Haverford, Pennsylvania, USA, 7 April
2007
Quantum Jazz, The Tao of Biology
What quantum coherence has to say about the organism, ethics, and ultimate
reality. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho
A fully
referenced version of this article is posted on ISIS members’ website. Details
here
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What
is quantum jazz?
Quantum Jazz [1] (SiS 32)
is the music of the organism dancing life into being. We are all quantum jazz
players, in the very substance of our being.
Like the little
fruitfly larva, the Daphnia,
and any other small creature, we too, would be resplendent in all the colours
of the rainbow when observed under the polarizing microscope at a special
setting that lets you see right through to the tissues and cells and especially
the molecules, as they are busy being alive, and keeping the organism alive.
Organisms
are thick with spontaneous activities
at every level, right down to the molecules, and the molecules are dancing,
even when the organisms sit still. The images obtained give direct evidence
of the remarkable coherence (oneness) of living organisms.
The macromolecules,
associated with lots of water, are in a dynamic liquid crystalline state,
where all the molecules are macroscopically aligned to form a continuum that
links up the whole body, permeating throughout the connective tissues, the
extracellular matrix, and into the interior of every single cell. And all
the molecules, including the water, are moving coherent ly together as a whole.
The liquid crystalline
continuum enables every single molecule to intercommunicate with every other.
The water, constituting some 70 percent by weight of the organism, is also
the most important for forming the liquid crystalline matrix, for intercommunication
and for the macromolecules to function at all [2-6] (The Rainbow and the Worm - The Physics
of Organisms 2nd Edition ; The Liquid Crystalline Organism and Biological Water, ISIS
scientific publication; Water, Water
Everywhere series, Science in Society 15 ;
New Age of Water series
Science in Society 23;
Science in Society 32).
Quantum jazz players
The quantum jazz players
you have seen in the video [7] (Quantum Jazz Parts 1& II, http://www.i-sis.org.uk/onlinestore/av.php)
are small creatures from our garden ponds and soils, set to music inspired
by them. Though no matter how good the composer and musician, and Julian Haffegee,
who composed, played, recorded and mixed the music, and Andy Watton, who edited
and married the video sequences to the music, are both very good, no one will
ever reach the creative, artistic and technical heights of the real quantum
jazz players. So that is a continual challenge for us all.
Quantum jazz
is the music of the organism dancing life into being, with every single cell,
every molecule and atom taking part, emitting light and sound with wavelengths
of nanometres to metres and kilometres; spanning a musical range of 70 octaves,
each improvising spontaneously and freely, yet keeping in tune and in step
with the whole.
There is no conductor or
choreographer. The organism is creating and recreating herself afresh with
each passing moment, recoding and rewriting the genes in her cells in an intricate
dance of life that enables the organism to survive and thrive. The dance is
written as it is performed; every movement is new, as it is shaped by what
has gone before. The organism never ceases to experience its environment and
registering its experience for future reference.
That’s why genetic
engineering fails. The rogue genes forced or smuggled into the organism cannot
intercommunicate with the whole, they do not know the score that has evolved
to perfection over billions of years, involving all the genes in the species’
genome. Furthermore, the rogue genes have a tendency to run amok. (See Living
with the Fluid Genome [8] (ISIS publication).
Quantum jazz is why ordinary
folks like us can talk and think at the same time while our lunch is being
processed to provide energy. It is also why top athletes can run a mile in
under four minutes, and kung fu masters can move with lightning speed and
fly through the air, as in the movie Crouching
Tiger Hidden Dragon. The coordination required for simultaneous
multiple tasks and for performing the most extraordinary feats both depend
on a special state of being whole, the ideal description for which is “quantum
coherence”. Quantum coherence is a paradoxical state that maximises both local
freedom and global cohesion. The technical details and scientific underpinnings
for quantum coherence of the organism are in my book the Rainbow Worm
[2].
The quantum coherent organism and the conservation of coherent energy
I came to the conclusion
that: The organism is, in the ideal,
a quantum superposition of coherent activities over all space-times, constituting
a pure coherent state towards which the system tends to return on being perturbed.
An intuitive picture of the quantum coherent organism is a perfect life cycle
coupled to energy (and material) flow. The perfect life cycle represents perpetual
return and renewal. It is a domain of coherent energy storage that accumulates
no waste or entropy within, because it mobilises energy most efficiently and
rapidly to grow and develop and reproduce. Not only does it not accumulate entropy,
but the waste or entropy exported outside is also minimised.
Of course, the perfect
life cycle is an ideal applying to an organism that is perfectly coherent,
that will never grow old or die, whereas real organisms do, some more slowly
than others. (Read my book on the secret for staying alive and young.)
Part of the
secret for quantum coherence is that the life cycle itself contains many cycles
of activities within. These cycles of different sizes are all coupled together
so that activities yielding energy transfer the energy directly to activities
requiring energy, losing little or nothing in the process. If you look inside
each small cycle that make up the whole life cycle, you will see the same
picture as the whole; and you can do this many times over until you come to
the smallest cycle, representing an electronic vibration that has the period
of femto-seconds (10-15s). This property of “self-similarity”
is characteristic of mathematical structures called fractals that typically
describe living processes such as the branching patterns of trees and blood
vessels.
This model of
the organism also describes a sustainable ecosystem or economic system [9,
10] (Genetic Engineering
Dream or Nightmare (final chapter); Sustainable
Systems as Organisms? ISIS scientific publication).
Intuitively,
you can see that the more cycles there are within the life cycle, the more
energy is stored, and for longer, because the more times the energy can be
used or recycled. The recycling and storage of coherent energy is against
all previous thinking, even among those taking unconventional positions against
the dominant model in calling for the recycling of materials. Energy, they say, cannot be reused, because it
flows in one direction only. But we can see how the model works in the concept
of a zero-emission, zero-waste farm that turns wastes and greenhouse gases
into food and energy resources, which we have proposed for mitigating climate
change and for addressing the food and energy crisis [11] (Dream Farm 2 - Story So Far,
SiS 31).
Hallmarks
of the quantum coherent organism
Let me highlight the hallmarks
of the quantum coherent organism that contrasts with the conventional view
of organisms as machines (From Molecular
Machines to Coherent Organism, ISIS scientific publication)
[12]. The organism is an incredible hive of activities from the very fast
to the very slow, the local to global, all perfectly coupled together, so
perfect that each activity appears to be operating as freely and spontaneously
as the whole. To be quantum coherent above all, is to be most spontaneous
and free.
The wave function
that describes the system is also a superposition of all possibilities. It
implies that the future is entirely open,
and the potentials infinite [2, 12].
Quantum coherence is the prerequisite for conscious
experience [13] ( Quantum
Coherence and Conscious Experience, ISIS scientific publications).
It is why each and every one of us thinks of ourselves as “I” in the singular
even though we are a multiplicity of organs, tissues and cells, and astronomical
numbers of molecules. We would have a wave function that evolves, constantly
informing the whole of our being, never ceasing to
entangle other quantum entities,
transforming itself in the process like a beautiful exotic golden flower,
flashing and flickering in and out of many dimensions at once.
To be quantum coherent is also to mobilize
energy most rapidly and efficiently, tointercommunicate nonlocally and instantaneously,
transcending the usual separations of space and time. That’s why
a ‘being’ can be in two places at the same time and different beings far,
far apart can exchange information instantaneously [2].
Quantum coherence
also raises my doubts over the conventional interpretations of Chinese Taoist
texts. Wu wei, for example,
is usually understood as “no action”. That may not the case; rather, it is
the ideal of “no bother”, or the possibility for effortless, coherent action, taken when the moment is
ripe, or just right, when the entire universe is at one with you.
Freedom, spontaneity,
effortless action and effortless creation are all Taoist ideals cultivated
in traditional Chinese art and poetry, in life itself.
There’s more
to the Tao of biology that quantum coherence brings to us. (I make no claims
to being an expert on Taoist philosophy, and defer to our host of the Global Philosophy Forum, Ashok Gangadean,
who knows much more than me.)
Sciencing with love
In the early days
after the first excitement of having discovered the liquid crystalline organism,
we asked a physicist colleague to help explain where the colours come from
[14] (To Science With Love,
SiS 17). But like many other
physicists, he was uncomfortable with the phenomenon, and probably quite unmoved
by it. One of his first questions was whether the colours are still there
when the organism is dead. (The answer turned out to be no, as we discovered
later, for the colours depend on coherent motions of all the molecules, which
can only occur in the living organism. As the organism dies, random thermal motion takes over and the
colours fade.)
Puzzled, I asked why he
wanted to know.
“Then I’d know the colours
are real,” he said, “and not artefacts.”
That comment neatly encapsulates
the mechanistic perspective of western science: life and its hallmarks - freedom,
spontaneity, love and consciousness - are all artefacts because nothing can
be said about them.
Organisms are deemed no
different from machines, devoid of feelings and consciousness, and to be exploited
like machines; thus sanctioning the most horrendous abuses of animals in scientific
experiments, the latest being transgenic animals and cloning [15] Is
FDA Promoting or Regulating Cloned Meat and Milk?, SiS
33).
The problem lies with how
we choose to see organisms,
not what they really are.
We now know how the colours come about [16, 17] (Organisms
as Polyphasic Liquid Crystals; Quantitative
Image Analysis of Birefringent Biological Materials; ISIS scientific publications).
But where do the colours really come from? Do they belong to the organism
or are they artefacts arising from the way we look at them?
The colours surely belong
to the organism, and accurately reflect the state of the organism from moment
to moment as it goes about its business of living. But we can’t see the colours
unless we set up the polarised light microscope in a particular way. The colours
arise in the act of knowing, in the union of the knower and the known.
This clearly demonstrates
that science isn’t about discovering the ‘facts of nature’ ‘objectively’,
or independently of us. Knowing depends irreducibly on both the knower and
the known. Artists and poets have always taken that for granted. But modern
western science is founded on severing our connection with nature, and so
the major strand of western philosophy is to puzzle over how it is possible
to know at all.
It took centuries of separating
and reducing nature to the limit of the quantum of action before western science was to rediscover
that nothing in nature is separate.
Everything is at once both localised
as particle and spread out as wave.
And seemingly separate objects,
from fundamental particles to atoms and molecules and increasingly larger
objects, could be mutually ‘entangled’, perhaps right up to the entire universe,
rather like the ‘holographic universe’ of Ervin Lazlo [18], in which, as in
the quantum coherent organism, every part of the universe is implicit in every
other.
Quantum physics also recovered
the simple truth that other cultures have never doubted, and call it aptly,
“the entanglement of the observer and the observed”.
In
other words, how we know
determines what we know. Scientific
knowledge is no different from art and poetry. In order to be a really good
scientist, I believe, one has to have the soul of a romantic poet. It was
only when I learned to know with the greatest sensitivity and compassion that
I was rewarded with the most resplendent vision of the organism. And who will
want to hurt a fly after that?
As
a biologist and then a biochemist, I was schooled to the routine of killing,
fixing, pinning, pulping, homogenising, separating and purifying until no
trace is left of the living organisation we were looking for. It violated
everything life stands for, and reinforced the illusion that the organism
is nothing but a machine, albeit, a very, very complicated machine.
The organic
whole works by mutual intercommunication. The healthy body has perfect knowledge
of itself because it is most coherent: every part of it is as sensitive as
it is responsive. There is literally a ‘wisdom of the body’, a term that physiologists
use to express the perfection with which all parts of the body work together
to maintain the whole.
There is now
evidence that molecules do intercommunicate by singing the same notes to one
another (and flashing the same signal) [19] (The Real Bioinformatics
Revolution, SiS 33).
The conventional wisdom is that molecules in solution ‘bump’ into each other
by chance, and if they fit together, like lock and key, they can latch onto
each other and do whatever is necessary. But the cell is extremely crowded
in a liquid crystalline state, where practically nothing is free to diffuse,
not even the water. So how can molecules find one another in the first instance?
It is like trying to find a friend in a very large and crowded ballroom in
the dark. But by intercommunicating or resonating at particular electromagnetic
frequencies, molecules can hear and see one another, as well as become ineluctably
attracted to one another. And that can happen only in a coherent, noiseless
system.
It is just the
same with knowing another organism, or whole ecosystems of organisms. Perfect,
authentic knowledge is gained when we are most coherent with what we want
to know, i.e., when we have become one
with it; when we are intercommunicating most sensitively, and both knower
and the known are most authentically and autonomously themselves. Isn’t this
like a perfect love affair? To really know something, you have to love it.
That’s why I’ve written on ‘sciencing with love’ [14].
Quantum coherent organisms invariably become entangled with one another. A
quantum world is a world of universal mutual entanglement, the prerequisite
for universal love and ethics. Because we are all entangled, and each being
is implicit in every other, the best way to benefit oneself is to benefit the
other. That’s why we can really love our neighbour as ourselves. It is heartfelt
and sincere. We are ethical and care about our neighbours and all of creation
because they are literally as dear to us as our own self.
Universal mutual entanglement is also the basis of a cosmic consciousness and
cosmic purpose [20] ( Is
There A Purpose in Nature? ISIS paper)
But let me backtrack a little.
The
quest for the ultimate reality of nature
Western science is founded
on atomism. Thousands of years have been dedicated to the quest for the most
fundamental particles of matter and to explaining nature in those terms.
The quest ended in
a way when Max Planck identified the smallest quantum of action in the constant
named after him [21], and founded quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics soon
came to be dominated by the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’, which ends up denying
that the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics has anything to say on
what nature is really like, especially with regard to the ‘measurement problem’
[22] ( Life & the Universe after
the Copenhagen Interpretation , SiS
34).
The wave function
of a physical system evolves as a linear superposition (combination) of different
quantum states encompassing all possibilities. But actual measurement always
finds the physical system in a definite state; and this is referred to as
“the collapse of the wave function.” The paradox is usually presented as the
parable of Schrödinger’s cat [23] (see Quantum
World Coming series, Science
in Society 22), an unfortunate creature imprisoned in a box with a capsule
of deadly cyanide gas that would be released the moment a radioactive nuclide
decays. The cat is therefore in a superposition of being alive, being dead,
and being both alive and dead at the same time until the box is opened, i.e.,
a measurement is performed; at which instant, the cat is either definitely
dead, or definitely alive.
What happens in the measurement
that converts the probabilities to an actual, sharply defined outcome? We
must not even ask that question, says the Copenhagen interpretation, as it
is meaningless. Physics is what we can say about nature, not how nature really
is.
The central problem of measurement
has provoked many alternative interpretations of quantum mechanics, some taking
us to the realm of ultimate reality, well beyond what ordinary physics can
say [24] ( Beyond the Central Dogma
of Physics, SiS 34).
The ultimate reality of a participatory creative universe
I have gone beyond
conventional quantum mechanics in proposing that the organism tends towards
a “superposition of coherent space-time modes (i.e., activities)” in a wave
function that evolves and transforms but never collapses. The same applies
to the universe, which may also be quantum coherent, filled, as it were, with
mutually entangled organisms each participating in every other [2, 13].
I follow in the footsteps
of British mathematician/philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who had argued
persuasively that quantum mechanics requires a thoroughly organic interpretation
[25]. He said the entire universe must be seen to consist of ‘vibratory organisms’
ranging from elementary particles to galaxies. But he had not considered quantum
coherence, which I believe necessary to complete his picture. The concept
of quantum coherence was not really developed until much later, in association
with superconductivity and lasers [2].
Today,
the theory of quantum coherence is quite well developed in quantum optics,
although it has not quite caught up with some rather amazing empirical evidence.
For example, there is experimental evidence indicating that the wave function
does not collapse, and entangled states may survive ‘measurements’ or interactions
with macroscopic devices [26] (How Not to Collapse the Wave Function
(SiS 22), and this has important
implications for quantum information and quantum computing [27] (The Quantum Information
Revolution, SiS 22). There
is also the suggestion that the universe itself may be quantum coherent [28]
(Quantum Phases and Quantum Coherence,
SiS 22). So the Copenhagen interpretation
may be wrong, or at best incomplete; and one can reject it and still be agnostic
about the nature of ultimate reality.
To me,
science, as knowledge of nature is inseparable from life and the meaning of
life. I see all nature developing and evolving, with every organism participating,
constantly creating and recreating itself anew. The universe is truly creative
in that the future is not preordained, but spontaneously and freely shaped
by every single being, from elementary particles to galaxies, from microbes
to the giant redwood trees, all mutually entangled in a universal wave function
that never collapses, but like a constantly changing cosmic consciousness,
maintains and informs the universal whole.
Do humans
have a special role in the universal consciousness? Yes we do, especially
if we see ourselves as the pinnacle of creative evolution. We have the power
to destroy the earth and bring about our own demise, as is clear from our
role in climate change. So certainly we have both the power and the responsibility
to put things right.
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